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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.
Ji-Feng Wang, Tsuneo Amano, Yuichi Ogawa, Nobuyuki Inoue
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 32 | Number 4 | December 1997 | Pages 590-600
Technical Paper | Special Section: Plasma Control Issues for Tokamaks / Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST97-A19906
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The dynamics of burning plasma for various transient situations in International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) plasma have been simulated with the 1½-dimensional up-down asymmetry Tokamak Transport Simulation code. Attention is paid primarily to intrinsic plasma transport processes such as confinement improvement and changes of plasma profiles. A large excursion of fusion power is shown to take place with a small improvement of plasma confinement; e.g., an increase of the global energy confinement by a factor of 1.2 yields a fusion power excursion of ∼30% within a few seconds. Given this short timescale of the fusion power transient, any feedback control of fueling deuterium-tritium gas is difficult. The effect of plasma profile on fusion power excursion is studied by changing the particle transport denoted by the peaking parameter Cv. When the fusion power excursion is mild and slow, the feedback control is quite effective in suppressing the fusion power excursion and in shortening the duration time of the power transient. Changes of the pumping efficacy are also studied, and large excursions of fusion power are not observed because of a decrease of the fuel density itself when the pumping efficacy is increased; and helium ash accumulates in the case of a decrease of the pumping efficacy. Finally, magnetohydrodynamic sawtooth activity leads to a fusion power fluctuation of ±20%, although such activity is helpful for helium ash exhaust.