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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.
Shinji Ueda, Hideki Kakiuchi, Hidenao Hasegawa, Shun'ichi Hisamatsu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1296-1299
Environmental and Organically Bound Tritium | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12668
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to simulate the behavior of radionuclides in a brackish lake, Lake Obuchi, adjacent to the first commercial spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Japan, we constructed a transfer model for radionuclides using a three-dimensional hydrodynamic model coupled with an ecosystem model. To validate the hydrodynamic model using actual field data, the concentration of tritium (3H) was measured in water samples collected in and around the lake from 2005 to 2008. The samples collected from 2006 to 2008 occasionally showed higher concentrations than background when high concentration seawater flowed into the lake with the tide. 3H concentrations in the lake water estimated by the model were generally within 10% of the observations, although the observed values were overpredicted by a factor of 2 in a few cases.