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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.
Denis Jurkin, Günther Müllen, Jörg Aign
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1403-1406
Detritiation and Isotope Separation | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12693
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritium separation factors are extraordinarily important parameters in the development of efficient electrolysis systems for HTO waste volume reduction and tritium recovery purposes as well as for the reproducible analysis of tritium in low-level environmental samples. In the present work, a modular, actively cooled, continuous feed electrolysis setup has been developed. In order to provide a basis for the analysis of electrode specific tritium separation factors and to investigate the system performance, electrolysis of tritiated water was conducted with constant current density in strongly alkaline medium (1 M sodium hydroxide) using platinum as reference electrode material. Furthermore, the energy saving potential of an increase of the number of cell compartments was investigated.
