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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.
T. Tanabe, K. Miyasaka, M. Rubel, V. Philipps
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 3 | May 2002 | Pages 924-928
Material Interaction and Permeation | Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology Tsukuba, Japan November 12-16, 2001 | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A22720
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to investigate tritium behavior in tokamak, we have measured surface distributions of deuterium and tritium on graphite limiter tiles used in TEXTOR under D-D operation by means of an ion beam analysis and tritium imaging plate technique, respectively. It was found that both distributions were quite different, i.e. deuterium retention was higher at the deposited area, whereas tritium retention was higher at the erosion dominated area. This is because tritium produced by the D-D reaction, initially having 1 MeV, did not fully lose its energy in the TEXTOR plasma and implanted into the plasma facing materials nearly homogeneously, whereas deuterium was codeposited with carbon and boron, the main impurities in the TEXTOR plasma. This is also confirmed by the finding that high level of tritium was detected beneath the deposited layer. Tritium distribution, however, was modified by the temperature increase due to plasma heat load. Thus the comparison of tritium profiles with the deuterium profile gives a large amount of important and new information on PMI, and may be used as a new diagnostic technique for PMI.