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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.
Roger O. Bangerter
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 13 | Number 2 | February 1988 | Pages 348-355
Technical Paper | Heavy-Ion Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST88-A25109
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The cost of an accelerator depends strongly on the requirements that it must satisfy to drive a target. Therefore, an important part of the Heavy-Ion Fusion Systems Assessment (HIFSA) Project has been a search for, and an assessment of, target concepts that might relax the accelerator requirements. This paper outlines the considerations that have guided the search for improved targets and gives a brief description of the various concepts that have been studied. Not all of the target concepts were sufficiently developed for inclusion in the HIFSA study and are discussed here for completeness. Recent work has led to new estimates of the gain of radiatively driven targets. This work was not completed in time for the HIFSA study, but is included in this paper. Although the new results differ substantially from the base case used in the study, a systems study performed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory shows that the new results increase the cost of electricity by slightly less than 10%.
