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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.
Ronald C. Kirkpatrick
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 1075-1078
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering and Diagnostics | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1639
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper deals with magnetized target fusion (MTF), which proposes to use a magnetic field to reduce the electron thermal conduction and to enhance energy deposition by the charged fusion products. Here we discuss two important aspects of charged particle interaction with the magnetized plasma: 1) the effect of the magnetic field on the stopping power of the plasma and 2) increased charged particle path length within the fusion fuel due to the contortion of the path by the field. The effect of the field on the stopping power depends on the ratios of several plasma parameters, including the Debye length, the Larmor radius, and the relative values of plasma, cyclotron, and collision frequencies. For the MTF regime these parameters are linked due to the need to have adequately magnetized plasma for the reduction of electron thermal conductivity and the need for adequately reduced density to insure that the radiation from the plasma is not too high. We use partially analytic results to show how field gradients shrink the size of the fusion ignition region in the Lindl-Widner diagrams.