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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.
Osamu Mitarai, Sean W. Wolfe, A. Hirose, Harvey M. Skarsgard
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 15 | Number 2 | March 1989 | Pages 204-213
Technical Paper | Fusion Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/FST89-A25357
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Alternating current (ac) tokamak operation in the reactor parameter range is studied by considering the volt-second consumption, A simple condition for obtaining ac operation with nearly constant pulse length is given by Lp/Rp < Td, ss (Lp is the plasma inductance, Rp is the plasma resistance, and Td, ss is the discharge length in the standard operation), assuming time-independent plasma parameters. The discharge length for ac operation is shorter than for standard operation and is given by where is the total transformer flux and is the plasma inductive flux. Alternating current operation is found to be advantageous in a large reactor having a large ohmic transformer flux satisfying . The superconducting magnetic energy storage system is proposed as an attractive power supply for ac operation in a large reactor.
