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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.
M. Iseli
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 1 | July-August 2005 | Pages 629-633
Technical Paper | Tritium Science and Technology - Materials Interaction and Permeation | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1004
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Knowledge of the levels of tritium in the First Wall (FW) coolant and components of ITER is important for public and operator safety and waste management. To overcome the large uncertainty of plasma wall interaction and physical properties, a basic set of properties is theoretically calculated for the dissolved tritium atoms in a perfect Beryllium (Be) lattice. These properties are combined with models for tritium trapping by lattice imperfections including the equilibrium conditions between gaseous, dissolved and trapped hydrogen isotopes. The 3 models for trapping by impurities, radiation damage and surface defects are adjusted to experimental solubilities, to tritium release experiments from irradiated samples and to outgassing of hydrogen isotopes from the JET FW. An elastic lattice model evaluates the activation energy of diffusion. For the calculations, the code DIET (Diffusion, Implantation and Equilibrium Trapping) was developed, which includes tritium trapping with time-dependent trap concentrations of multiple trap sites. The sensitivity analysis, with the expected deviations from the basic properties provides confidence that tritium permeation is below one gram in ITER for a neutron load of 0.3 MWa/m2 within 10 years.