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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.
Bo Lehnert
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 13 | Number 1 | January 1988 | Pages 87-92
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST88-A25086
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Steady states of a Z-pinch where no electric field is imposed along the pinch axis by external means are investigated. In this case, diffusion-driven states become possible when imposed volume sources of particles and heat drive a radial diffusion velocity that, in its turn, generates the electric plasma current. The particle sources can be from pellet injection or a neutral gas blanket, and the heat sources provided by thermonuclear reactions or auxiliary heating. The present analysis and associated kinetic considerations indicate that steady diffusion-driven operation should become possible for certain classes of plasma profiles, without running into singularity problems at the pinch axis. Such operation leads to higher axial currents in a Z-pinch without an axial magnetic field than in a tokamaklike case under similar plasma conditions. The technical difficulty in realizing a volume distribution of particle sinks introduces certain constraints on the plasma and current profiles. This fact has to be taken into account in a stability analysis. Neoclassical or anomalous diffusion will increase the diffusion velocity of the plasma but is not expected to affect the main physical features of the present results.