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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.
Hiroshi Yoshida, Hidefumi Takeshita, Satoshi Konishi, Hideo Ohno, Toshimasa Kurasawa, Hitoshi Watanabe, Yuji Naruse
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 5 | Number 2 | March 1984 | Pages 178-188
Technical Paper | Tritium Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST84-A23092
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experimental and theoretical feasibility studies of a catalytic reduction method were carried out for application to the tritium recovery processes in fusion reactor systems. Experiments on the decomposition of water vapor were performed under the following conditions: temperatures of 350 to 650 K; an H2O vapor concentration of 103 to 104 ppm; a mole ratio of CO to H2O of 1 to 10; and a space velocity of 2 × 102 to 2 × 104 h−1. The catalyst used was a mixture of CuO, ZnO, and Cr2O3. It has been demonstrated that this method using the zinc-stabilized catalyst can be adapted to recover tritium from tritiated water with a high conversion ratio (>0.999 per one path) at comparatively low temperature (450 K). The catalytic rate equation and the rate constants determined by this work can be used for designing a practical catalytic reduction bed for the decomposition process of the tritiated water.