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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.
I. S. Chernoshtanov, Yu. A. Tsidulko
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | May 2013 | Pages 319-321
doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A16941
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Alfvén ion cyclotron (AIC) instability margin in a mirror trap with skew injection of fast neutral beams into a target plasma is investigated in the present work. The instability is driven by inverse population of trajectories of resonant ions having velocity near the injection velocity. So, the stability margin depends strongly on injection details, in particular an injection angle and angular width. The absolute instability margin analysis as well as WKB-analysis on longitudinal and transversal coordinates are used for the stability threshold studying. Simple estimations relating the wave parameters to injection parameters are presented. The stabilizing effect of strong transversal non-uniformity is shown.