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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.
Dalin Zhang, Xue-Nong Chen, Fabrizio Gabrielli, Andrei Rineiski, Werner Maschek
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 287-292
Modeling and Simulations | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13434
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The concept of traveling wave reactor (TWR) applies the mechanism of self sustainable and propagation nuclear fission traveling waves in fertile media of 238U and 232Th to achieve very high fuel utilization. However, the long wave length of such fission traveling wave puts a limit on the applicability of the TWR concept. The axial fuel shuffling strategy is proposed based on the mechanism of asymptotic nuclear fission traveling wave, and is applied to a sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) loading metallic 238U fuel. The multi-group deterministic neutronic code ERANOS with JEFF3.1 data library is used as a basic tool to perform the neutronics and burn-up calculations. The calculations are firstly performed in a 1-D case for parametric understanding, and further extended to a 2-D R-Z case. The shuffling calculations for the 1-D and 2-D SFR model described in this paper brought about some interesting results. The results indicate that keff parabolically varies with the shuffling period, while the burn-up increases linearly. The highest burn-up achieved in 2-D case is 46at%. The power shape distortion in 2-D case is observed, and the power peaking factor is much higher than that in 1-D case, but it decreases with the shuffling period increasing.