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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.
Karl Lackner, Hartmut Zohm
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | January 2013 | Pages 43-48
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-520
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tokamak equilibria with a snowflake divertor configuration are studied using a wire current model in toroidal geometry. A set of conditions for the formation of a snowflake divertor that can also be applied in full equilibrium calculations using a Grad-Shafranov solver is presented. It is shown that by taking into account the vertical force balance of the plasma, previously obtained results using a simple wire model have to be corrected. For a reactor-type device with coils far away from the plasma to accommodate the shielding requirements, the poloidal field coil currents become so high that they will represent a major technological challenge.
