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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.
A. S. Ware, D. A. Spong, L. A. Berry, S. P. Hirshman, J. F. Lyon
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 236-244
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1241
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work examines bootstrap current in quasi-symmetric stellarators with a focus on the impact of bootstrap current on the equilibrium properties of stellarator configurations. In the design of the Quasi-Poloidal Stellarator (QPS), a code was used to predict the bootstrap current based on a calculation in an asymptotically collisionless limit. This calculation is believed to be a good approximation of the bootstrap current for low-collisionality plasmas but is expected to be higher than the actual bootstrap current for more collisional plasmas. A fluid moments approach has been developed to self-consistently calculate viscosities and neoclassical transport coefficients. The viscosities and transport coefficients can be used to calculate the bootstrap current for arbitrary collisionality and magnetic geometry. The bootstrap current calculations from the two codes were done for low-density, electron cyclotron-heated (ECH) plasmas and high-density, ion cyclotron-heated (ICH) plasmas for a range of configurations, and provide a benchmark for the moments code and a test of the range of validity of the collisionless code. In the configurations examined here, namely, QPS, the National Compact Stellarator Experiment, the Helically Symmetric Experiment, the Large Helical Device, and the Wendelstein-7X Stellarator, the bootstrap currents predicted from the two codes agree qualitatively for both ICH and ECH profiles.
