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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.
Yican Wu, Qunying Huang, Zhiqiang Zhu, Sheng Gao, Yong Song
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 62 | Number 1 | July-August 2012 | Pages 272-275
Fusion Technology Facilities | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Fusion Reactor Materials, Part A: Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A14146
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The liquid LiPb blanket concept has become a promising design for fusion reactor in the world, and a series of fusion reactors with LiPb blankets have been designed by FDS team in China. To support the various designs and technologies of Chinese LiPb breeder blankets, LiPb experimental loops have been built to follow the different phases of LiPb blankets requirements and to achieve different testing functions. Three thermal convection loops named DRAGON-I, II, and III were built to carry out the compatibility experiments and validate the loop technology, and the multifunctional forced convection loops named DRAGON-IV and V were built or designed to validate the magnetohydrodynamic effect and thermal-hydraulics test. Three sets of He-LiPb dual-coolant auxiliary systems named DRAGON-VI, VII, and VIII were designed and proposed for testing test blanket modules in EAST, ITER, and DEMO blankets in the future. An overview on the design and construction of these loops is introduced in this paper, as well as some preliminary experiments done in the loops.