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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.
X.-N. Chen, D. Zhang, W. Maschek
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 275-280
Modeling and Simulations | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13432
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper is a theoretical study of a radial standing wave, which can be applied in the so-called traveling wave reactor (TWR). Two-dimensional cylindrical core geometry is considered and the fuel is assumed to drift radially, which corresponds to a radial fuel shuffling scheme in practice. A one-group diffusion equation coupled with burn-up equations is set up, where the burn-up solution is obtained numerically. The uranium-plutonium (U-Pu) conversion cycle with pure 238U as fresh fuel is considered under conditions of a typical sodium cooled fast reactor with metallic uranium fuel loaded. The asymptotic problem is solved by a time-stepping iteration scheme and the radial standing wave solution is obtained together with certain eigenvalue keff.The neutron flux, the neutron fluence and the net neutron generation cross section are presented and discussed for the inward fuel drifting motion.
