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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.
David R. Mikkelsen, Clifford E. Singer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 237-252
Technical Paper | Special Section Content / Fusion Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22816
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent developments in neutral beam technology prompt us to reconsider the prospects for steady-state tokamak reactors. A mathematical reactor model is developed that includes the physics of beam-driven currents and reactor power balance, as well as reactor and beam system costs. This model is used to find the plasma temperatures that minimize the reactor cost per unit of net electrical output. The optimum plasma temperatures are nearly independent of ß and are roughly twice as high as the optimum temperatures for ignited reactors. If beams of neutral deuterium atoms with near-optimum energies of 1 to 2 MeV are used to drive the current in a reactor the size of the International Tokamak Reactor, then the optimum temperatures are typically Te ≃ 12 to 15 keV and Ti≃ 17 to 21 keV for a wide range of model parameters. Net electrical output rises rapidly with increasing deuterium beam energy for Eb ≾ 400 keV, but rises only slowly above Eb ∼ 1 MeV. We estimate that beam-driven steady-state reactors could be economically competitive with pulsed-ignition reactors if cyclic-loading problems limit the toroidal magnetic field strength of pulsed reactors to ≾85% of that allowed in steady-state reactors.