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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. Reimerdes, R. J. Buttery, A. M. Garofalo, Y. In, R. J. La Haye, M. J. Lanctot, M. Okabayashi, J.-K. Park, M. J. Schaffer, E. J. Strait, F. A. Volpe
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 3 | April 2011 | Pages 572-585
Lecture | Fourth ITER International Summer School (IISS2010) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11698
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tokamak plasmas can be sensitive to external nonaxisymmetric magnetic perturbations that are several orders of magnitude smaller than the axisymmetric field. These perturbations, which are usually undesired and are referred to as error fields, can limit operation by braking the plasma rotation until an instability such as a tearing mode, a resistive wall mode, or an error field-driven locked mode leads to an unacceptable confinement degradation or a disruption. Auxiliary heating can have two competing effects: On one hand higher leads to a degradation of the error field tolerance through plasma amplification and stronger braking, and on the other hand higher toroidal rotation can tolerate a higher magnetic braking torque. A widely used technique to detect and correct error fields is based on the characteristic density dependence of the error field tolerance in ohmic plasmas. An alternative technique is based on the measurable plasma amplification of the error field in high- plasmas. However, the detection and correction of error fields in ITER will require a modification of the present techniques in order to avoid disruptions and deal with insufficient plasma amplification of the error field at low , before the full set of auxiliary heating systems will be available. The adaptation of current techniques to address these concerns is likely, but an experimental demonstration as well as an improved physics basis is needed and remains the subject of current research.