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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.
K. Toi, F. Watanabe, S. Ohdachi, S. Morita, X. Gao, K. Narihara, S. Sakakibara, K. Tanaka, T. Tokuzawa, H. Urano, A. Weller, I. Yamada, L. Yan, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 61-69
Chapter 3. Confinement and Transport | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10794
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The L-H transition was observed in a unique helical divertor configuration where the core plasma is surrounded by ergodic layer, exhibiting rapid increase in edge electron density with sudden depression of H emission. Just after the transition, edge transport barrier (ETB) is formed at the plasma edge in the magnetic hill region, developing a steep density gradient. ETB region extends in ergodic layer beyond the last closed flux surface defined by the vacuum field. The transition occurs in relatively high beta plasmas when neutral beam absorbed power (Pabs) exceeds one to three times the ITER H-mode power threshold. Improvement of energy confinement time is modest (<1.1) for the ISS95 international stellarator scaling, whereas the particle confinement is clearly improved. The ETB width tends to increase with the increase in the toroidal beta at the ETB shoulder. ETB formation leads to destabilization of edge magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) modes with m/n = 2/3 or 1/2 (m and n being the poloidal and toroidal mode numbers) in ETB region of the inward-shifted configurations. Edge-localized modes (ELMs) are excited by these edge MHD modes through nonlinear evolution. Sometimes in outward-shifted plasmas, edge MHD modes are clearly suppressed in the H-phase and lead to an ELM-free H-mode. When large m/n = 1/1 resonant magnetic perturbations are applied to neutral beam injection-heated plasmas, the transition takes place at lower line-averaged electron density having the modest increase in electron temperature and small-amplitude ELMs.