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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.
Chris Day, August Mack, Manfred Glugla, David K. Murdoch
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 3 | May 2002 | Pages 602-606
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-A22659
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The tritium inventory of an experimental fusion reactor like ITER is determined by a broad range of influential factors. The tritium retention in the vacuum system is one important contribution to the overall tritium inventory. The high vacuum system for ITER is based on a set of cryogenic pumps, and sees the whole spectrum of tritiated gas species. The cryopumps are accumulation pumps; thus, the semi-permanent tritium inventory present in them is governed by the effectiveness of pump regeneration. Moreover, a permanent inventory background must also be envisaged. This paper delineates the staggered pump concept and a multi-stage regeneration scheme as main measures for step-wise minimisation of the tritium inventory in the high vacuum pump system and outlines the different contributions which add to it. By these methods, the 268 g of tritium inventory present after nominal long pulse operation of ITER, depending on the chosen fuelling case, can be reduced to 6 g in the pumps themselves, plus up to 100 g of codeposited tritium needing recovery clean-up.
