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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.
K. J. Caspary, B. E. Chapman, S. P. Oliva, S. T. A. Kumar
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 62 | Number 3 | November 2012 | Pages 375-378
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A15336
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
On the Madison Symmetric Torus magnetic fusion plasma experiment, frozen pellet injection is an established method of depositing deuterium fuel into the core of the plasma. To freeze deuterium gas into pellets, the injector is cooled to 10 K with a cryogenic helium refrigerator. To exhaust residual frozen deuterium following injection of each pellet, the injector is warmed by resistive heating to >18.7 K, the triple point of deuterium. Motivated by the desire to inject carbon-containing pellets, the injector was modified to allow the freezing and injection of methane. The triple point of methane, 90.7 K, is well beyond the capability of the resistive heating hardware. To supplement the resistive heating, a small, steady flow of room-temperature helium was introduced as a heat source. The flow rate was optimized to provide minimum and maximum injector temperatures of 24 and 95 K, respectively, sufficient for methane pellet formation and exhaust. The flow rate can easily be optimized for other gases as well.