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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.
Karl H. Spatschek
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 67-80
Technical Paper | Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics - Kinetic Theory | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1105
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The statistical description of a hot, magnetized, and classical plasma is reviewed. The latter represents the appropriate model for a fusion plasma in magnetic confinement. Approaches for (reduced) kinetic descriptions are presented. We first briefly discuss the Landau-Fokker-Planck equation. The famous Boltzmann equation for dilute gases is then presented (without a systematic derivation), and the differences between the kinetic and the hydrodynamic regimes are worked out. In the main part, the consequences of long-range Coulomb interactions are demonstrated. Several plasma-kinetic equations, like for instance the Balescu-Lenard equation, are systematically presented. Physical consequences from the linearization of the kinetic equations, e.g., collision frequencies and Landau damping, are elucidated. In the final part of the paper the specific re-formulations in magnetized plasmas are sketched. The drift-kinetic and the gyro-kinetic approaches are presented. The paper is concluded by an outlook on often used truncations.