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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. Robinson, L. El-Guebaly, D. Henderson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 720-724
Nuclear Analysis & Experiments | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12470
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Every few years, maintenance will be required to replace the plasma facing components of any fusion power plant. To come up with a realistic maintenance scheme, an accurate method of evaluating the biological dose rate is needed. In some studies, the simple and quick approach of the contact dose rate for a specific component was used to estimate the biological dose rate. This method doesn't take radiation from nearby components into account and the accuracy of its methodology is questionable. The more accurate multi-step method, which involves transporting the delayed gammas from induced activation in the forward or adjoint mode, is able to take radiation from all surrounding components into account. In this report, the biological dose rate was evaluated with the adjoint method at selected radial locations of ARIES-CS, and then compared to the contact dose rate of the nearest component to determine the accuracy of the contact dose method. Our results indicate that the approximate contact dose rate could be off by an order of magnitude.
