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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.
Hajime Aoyama, Shunsuke Hosokawa, Masao Matsuyama, Tetsutaro Seki, Takeshi Itoh, Kuniaki Watanabe, Kazuyoshi Ishikawa, Katsuyoshi Tatenuma
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 3 | May 2002 | Pages 588-592
Device, Facility, and Operation | Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology Tsukuba, Japan November 12-16, 2001 | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A22656
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For a routine cleaning and a primary decontamination of tritiated contaminants in the case of decommissioning, a decontamination robot based on dry method utilizing ozone gas treatment was developed. The robot sized of 720(W)x850(D)x1,050(H) mm with a remote and automatic system consists mainly of 5 different part, a flat decontamination port of about 1,000 cm2 for ozone gas exposure with a heater and surrounding rubber curtain to isolate the inside circumstance, an ozone gas generator utilizing creeping discharge method, a gas cooler for the hot air containing tritiated vapor to be trapped, an adsorption vessel packing molecular-sieves for tritium trap, and a circulation pump. The amount of suction air is larger than that of the exposure air, therefore, non of the contaminants are scattered out from the adsorption port, and this is one of the main characteristic of the robot.