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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.
J. K. Anderson et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 1 | January 2011 | Pages 27-30
doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11567
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new 1 MW neutral beam injector (START-20F) is in operation on the Madison Symmetric Torus (MST) reversed field pinch. The beam, consisting of two arc discharge plasma generators, an optimized ion optical system and an integrated neutralizer/injector tank, operates at 25kV and up to 40A of neutrals for a 20 msec pulse (compared to a typical MST pulse length of 60 msec). The injected 1 MW of hydrogen neutrals (with approximately 85% in the full energy component) is significant compared to the 3-4 MW of ohmic input power in a typical target discharge. At this beam energy and a background electron density of about 1x1019 m-3 and temperature 1keV, roughly 90% of the injected power is deposited within the plasma. Initial experiments with the high power NBI show a large heating of the bulk ions: the fit of the width of energy spectrum as measured by Rutherford scattering (which is generally related to core ion temperature) quickly increases from 180eV to 230eV. This apparent significant and rapid heating of bulk ions is difficult to explain by classical collisions only, as modeling predicts 75% of the injected power is deposited on electrons and 15% on ions. The confinement of the fast ions (measured by the persistence in time of fusion neutrons due to a small fraction of deuterium in the beam fuel) is much greater than the canonical 1 msec confinement of particles and energy in the MST. The fast particle confinement is measured to increase with magnetic field strength. Further recent experiments document fast particle confinement time versus direction of injection (parallel or antiparallel to central magnetic field), beam energy, and background plasma properties.