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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.
Akira Suda, Minoru Obara, Akira Noguchi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 11 | Number 3 | May 1987 | Pages 548-559
Technical Paper | KrF Laser | doi.org/10.13182/FST87-A25035
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Atmospheric pressure operation of the electron-beam (e-beam)-excited KrF laser can greatly reduce the design constraints on a large-aperture laser module in the megajoule-class system as an inertial confinement fusion driver. The krypton-rich and Kr/F2 mixtures are suitable for the atmospheric pressure operation because these can produce high specific output energy without serious reduction of the intrinsic efficiency compared with conventional argon-rich mixtures. A 50-ns e-beam generator was used to pump the KrF laser oscillator by which fundamental studies of the KrF laser with atmospheric pressure krypton-rich mixtures were performed. A larger apparatus, using another 65-ns e-beam generator, demonstrated the specific output energy of 6.6 J/ℓ from a Kr/F2 mixture with an intrinsic efficiency of 6%. The latter apparatus was then used as an oscillator-amplifier system to investigate the amplifier characteristics of the KrF laser because the atmospheric pressure krypton-rich mixture is useful for large amplifier modules. In this oscillator-amplifier experiment, the power efficiency (extracted intensity divided by excitation rate and active length) in excess of 10% was obtained for krypton-rich mixtures.
