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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.
N. Tamura, S. Inagaki, T. Tokuzawa, C. Michael, K. Tanaka, K. Ida, T. Shimozuma, S. Kubo, K. Itoh, Y. Nagayama, K. Kawahata, S. Sudo, A. Komori, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 122-130
Chapter 3. Confinement and Transport | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10799
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The observation of a significant rise of the core electron temperature Te in response to edge cooling in a helical plasma was first made on the Large Helical Device (LHD). When the phenomenon takes place, the core electron heat flux is reduced abruptly without changing the thermodynamic values in the region of interest (core). Thus, the phenomenon observed in LHD can be equated to a "nonlocal transport phenomenon," observed so far only in tokamaks. The nonlocal transport phenomenon in LHD takes place in almost the same parametric domain (i.e., in a high-temperature and low-density regime) as in tokamaks. Meanwhile, various new aspects of the nonlocal transport phenomenon have been revealed by the LHD experiments; for example, (1) in LHD, the nonlocal transport phenomenon has been observed in net current-free plasmas sustained only by electron cyclotron heating. This experimental result can completely rule out the contribution of the toroidal plasma current as a reason for the nonlocal transport phenomenon. (2) It has been found that during the nonlocal transport phenomenon, there appears a strong correlation between core electron heat flux and edge Te gradient on a timescale shorter than the diffusion time and a spatial scale longer than the microturbulence correlation length. At that time, it was also found that an envelope of density fluctuations is modulated with a low frequency (2 kHz), which suggests the existence of a long-ranged turbulent structure in the plasma, where the nonlocal transport phenomenon can appear.