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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.
Yu. Igitkhanov, B. Bazylev, I. Landman
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 245-249
Plasma-Material Interactions | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A18084
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the steady-state operation the life-time performance of functional and structural materials in fusion reactor DEMO will be limited by several processes such as a sputtering erosion, transient events and neutron irradiation. The design strategy is to determine the structure and coating thicknesses which maximize component lifetime against all lifetime limitations. The sputtering erosion of the first wall tungsten armor layer due to the plasma impact during the steady state DEMO operation is considered here. It is shown that for DEMO conditions the total sputtering erosion of W armor by the charge-exchange DT neutrals could at least reach~1mm during one year of steady-state operation.
