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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.
Y. Ichimasa, H. Takano, T. Uda, M. Ichimasa
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 3 | May 2002 | Pages 417-421
Biology | Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology Tsukuba, Japan November 12-16, 2001 | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A22623
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Organically bound tritium (OBT) transfers into human body via food chain. ICRP report recommends that the dose due to OBT ingestion is 2.3 times higher than that due to HTO. Thymidine is a specific precursor of DNA. There were several reports on ingestion experiments of OBT including 3H-thymidine. However, the concentrations of tritiated compounds used in those experiments were extremely high compared with environmental tritium concentration. Therefore, in this study, we used tritiated compounds with 100 times of concentration based on the highest concentration in rain after nuclear tests during the 1960's, i.e. 700 Bq tritium/l rainwater. Mice were chronically fed with each one of tritiated organic compounds, 3H-thymidine, 3H-leucine, 3H-glucose or HTO for comparison, and the excretion and distribution of tritium in mouse body and tritium uptake into DNA in each tissue were determined at 180th, 240th, and 300th day of ingestion. Almost no significant differences were found between the dose rates from DNA-bound tritium throughout long-term exposure by ingestion of tritiated organic compounds and that of HTO.