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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.
S. B. Kim, S. L. Chouhan, P. A. Davis
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 960-963
Measurement, Monitoring, and Accountancy | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12575
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The high mobility of tritium as HTO implies that, under steady-state conditions, the T/H ratio (or equivalently the HTO concentration) is the same in all water compartments of the environment. This is the basis of the specific activity (SA) model, which underlies almost all environmental tritium models. SA concepts apply to organically bound tritium (OBT) as well, since the OBT formed by a given plant process at a given time has a T/H ratio that reflects the ratio in the water that enters into that process. There is no empirical evidence that the bioaccumulation of tritium in aquatic and wetland plants will occur. OBT/HTO ratios less than one is consistently found in the laboratory where the HTO concentrations to which the plants are exposed can be held constant. These data suggest a value of 0.7 for the OBT/HTO ratio under equilibrium conditions in the laboratory. Theoretical considerations suggest that the value of the OBT/HTO ratio in plants is significantly different from one and, in most cases, greater than one. This is primarily due to the much longer residence time of OBT in plants as compared to HTO. The observed HTO concentrations are much higher than OBT concentrations, which makes OBT/HTO ratio smaller than unit in contrast with SA based expectations. In addition to this, the IMPACT model overpredicted HTO and OBT concentrations in plants and animals by a factor of 3 or 4, on average. This work is summary of the AECL funded research project (1).