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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.
Ezio Bittoni, Marcel Haegi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 18 | Number 3 | November 1990 | Pages 373-383
Alpha Particles in Fusion Research | Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST90-A29270
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Calculation of alpha-particle confinement by a guiding center orbit-following numerical code requires the computation of very long particle trajectories. Due to their enormous length, these computations are subject to the possible accumulation of small errors, and the alpha-particle population is usually extrapolated from a single-particle history for every point of the initial parameter space. To overcome these difficulties, a numerical diffusion coefficient is derived for each point of the initial parameter space by averaging over a certain number of single-particle histories for each point of this space. This method has been applied to fast-alpha-particle confinement of the Next European Torus benchmark and the numerically derived diffusion coefficients are compared with analytical expressions from theoretical models.
