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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.
Masami Ohnishi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 2 | Number 4 | October 1982 | Pages 609-616
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST82-A20801
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Since an ignited deuterium-tritium plasma of a moving ring compact torus reactor (MRCTR) is thermally unstable at the operating temperature, suppression of the thermal instability is an essential issue for maintaining the stationary burning of a plasma. The feedback stabilization by means of major radial compression-decompression is proposed for a burn control in an MRCTR. The compression-decompression is carried out through the regulation of the solenoidal magnetic field according to the deviation of the ion temperature from the equilibrium value. The dynamics of a plasma core with a feedback control is calculated in a zero-dimensional plasma model assuming the empirical confinement scalings obtained in the present tokamak experiments. The effects of ion density on the dynamics are also studied for two extreme cases of complete particle recycling and perfect pumping. The scheme is found to be effective for the burn control. The deviations of a major radius and a fusion output power are less than several percents of the equilibrium values during the control to suppress the temperature excursion. The rate of change in the magnetic field for the control is as slow as 500 G/s.
