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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
Challenge: Accelerate development and qualification of advanced materials.
How: Use science-based design to reduce the development and qualification timeline for new nuclear fuels and advanced materials that can withstand extreme fission, fusion, and space power and propulsion environments.
Background: Advanced fission and fusion reactor designs offer many potential benefits, but will require new materials to be optimized. These advanced reactors have unique challenges that call for materials to resist corrosion when in prolonged contact with liquid salts or liquid metals, remain strong at elevated temperatures in a neutron field, maintain structural integrity when exposed to high fluxes of light ions and high heat flux, resist reaction in a loss of coolant event, and more.
Materials must be developed and qualified for each of these areas so that they can be implemented in new reactors. Materials issues lie at the heart of many of the technology issues that need to be solved. Without advanced materials, adequately qualified so that they can be used in engineering designs, we will never have a viable fusion or advanced fission power plant. This is a multi-faceted challenge that benefits not only nuclear energy research, but has applications for many other industries.
The current development and qualification timeline is long, especially due to limited experimental facilities and capabilities for in-reactor material irradiation testing. Significant scientific advances over the past few decades have enabled us to improve our understanding of irradiation effects on materials, including predictive capabilities. As such, we believe we can utilize these advancements to accelerate the materials qualification timeline, effectively reducing that barrier against deployment of future reactor technologies. Realizing this goal will include smart use of advanced modeling approaches, the establishment of experimental facilities and data generation for validation analysis (especially for advanced reactors), and reconsideration or modification of existing requirements for in-reactor material irradiation testing.
Additionally, decades of ion beam irradiation have proven it to be an extremely useful tool to enhance the understanding of radiation damage in materials for nuclear applications. Inducing radiation damage utilizing ion beams in structural materials and fuels causes high displacement damage rates and therefore accelerates the research on the materials response under these conditions.
Last modified May 12, 2017, 1:23am CDT
