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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.
Lydia Bondareva
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1304-1307
Environmental and Organically Bound Tritium | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12670
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The operation of the Mining and Chemical Combine situated on the bank of the Yenisei River has resulted in intensive radioactive pollution of all components of the ecosystem by pollutants including tritium. Although tritium is considered to be little accumulated in bottom sediments and soils, it has been found that depending on the geochemical properties of soils tritium can be accumulated in some rocks due to binding with organic substances of the soil or penetrating into the layers of clay minerals and retaining in the interlayer space. Depending on the way of tritium inflow (water way or bottom sediments) it is distributed in plant parts non-uniformly. Here, in all the cases lamina dominates as the part of the plants most actively participating in photosynthesis. At constant tritium inflow to the Canada water weed biomass the intervention level for tritium was 2900 Bq/l.