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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.
H. Kawashima, S. Sengoku, K. Uehara, H. Tamai, T. Shoji, H. Ogawa, T. Shibata, M. Yamamoto, Y. Miura, Y. Kusama, H. Kimura, H. Amemiya, Y. Sadamoto, Y. Nagashima
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 168-186
Technical Paper | JFT-2M Tokamak | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1093
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experimental efforts on JFT-2M have been devoted to understanding the scrape-off-layer (SOL)/divertor plasmas and to investigating power and particle control by boundary plasma modification. Starting in 1985, an open divertor configuration was adopted for the first decade of the JFT-2M experiments. The characteristics of SOL/divertor plasmas such as in/out asymmetry for divertor plasmas, heat and particle diffusivities, and SOL current during an edge-localized-mode event were identified. The power and particle flux was successfully handled by active control methods such as local pumping, boundary plasma ergodization, divertor biasing, electron cyclotron wave edge heating, and fueling optimization. In 1995, to improve the power and particle control capability of the divertor, the JFT-2M divertor was modified to have a closed configuration, which demonstrated the baffling effects with its narrower divertor throat. A dense and cold divertor state (nediv = 4 × 1019 m-3 and Tediv = 4 eV), compatible with improved confinement modes (e.g., H-mode), was realized with strong gas puffing in a closed configuration. Edge plasma fluctuations related to the H-mode physics were identified by an electrostatic probe and magnetic measurements. These are reviewed in this paper.