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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. P. Graves, I. T. Chapman, S. Coda, T. Johnson, M. Lennholm, J. I. Paley, O. Sauter, JET-EFDA Contributors
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 3 | April 2011 | Pages 539-548
Lecture | Fourth ITER International Summer School (IISS2010) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11695
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Important advances have been made recently in the invention and application of experimental methods to control the sawtooth instability in tokamak plasmas. The primary means of control involves the application of either ion cyclotron resonance heating (ICRH), or electron cyclotron heating, with resonance very close to the q = 1 radius in the plasma core. Reported here are experiments that have successfully applied these methods to either shorten or lengthen the sawteeth deliberately, in a variety of plasma conditions, in three tokamaks: Joint European Torus (JET), TCV, and Tore Supra. It is shown that despite the sensitivity of the sawtooth period to the resonance position, sawteeth can be controlled using either real-time control of the electron cyclotron deposition, or in the case of ion cyclotron heating, very careful adjustment of the magnetic field strength and minority ion concentration. The latter technique has been guided by theoretical advances that have enabled the control of sawteeth in JET with ITER-relevant ICRH scenarios.
