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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.
Yoshinori Kawamura, Mikio Enoeda, R. Scott Willms, Peter M. Zielinski, Richard H. Wilhelm, Masataka Nishi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 37 | Number 1 | January 2000 | Pages 54-61
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST00-A121
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The cryosorption method is useful for extracting hydrogen isotopes from a helium gas stream with a small amount of hydrogen isotopes. Therefore, in fusion reactors, this method is expected to be applied for the helium glow discharge exhaust gas processing system and the blanket tritium recovery system. To design these systems, adsorption isotherms for each hydrogen isotope are needed, making it possible to estimate the amount of adsorption in a wide pressure range. The amount of tritium adsorption on molecular sieve 5A, molecular sieve 4A, and activated carbon, which are potential adsorbents in the cryosorption bed, at liquid nitrogen temperature were quantified using the volumetric method. It was found that adsorption isotherms of tritium were also expressed with the two-site Langmuir model and that the obtained isotherms were close to the reported isotherms, the Langmuir coefficients for which were estimated using a reduced mass of hydrogen isotopes.
