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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.
Tomoyuki Johzaki, Kunioki Mima, Yasuyuki Nakao, Tomohiro Yokota, Hiroyuki Sumita
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 3 | May 2003 | Pages 428-436
Technical Paper | Fast Ignition Targets and Z-Pinch Concepts | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A288
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To investigate core plasma heating in fast ignition, a relativistic Fokker-Planck code for fast electrons is developed in a one-dimensional planar coordinates system. It is found that in dense plasmas, the Joule heating is much smaller than the heating through Coulomb interactions. In the latter energy deposition process, the long-range collective effect is comparable to that of binary electron-electron collisions. Moreover, on the basis of coupled transport-hydrodynamic simulations in one-dimensional planar geometry, the core heating process for an ignition-experiment-grade compressed core (R = 0.3 g/cm2) is examined, and a possibility of evaluation of burn history from the neutron spectrum is shown. It is shown that a relatively low energy component (E0 1 MeV) of electron beams plays an important role for effective core heating in fast ignition.