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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.
Peter H. Handel
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 18 | Number 3 | November 1990 | Pages 512-517
Technical Notes on Cold Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST90-A29287
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Heterogeneous nucleation of D2 bubbles at the surface of the cathode is suggested as the cause of difficulties encountered in the reproduction of electrolytic coldfusion experiments. In some experiments, active nucleation centers are present only intermittently leading to a temporary increase in the chemical potential of deuterium in the cathode up to the homogeneous nucleation limit, which is ∼1.2 eV higher. The increased effective mass of electrons, expressed in the electronic specific heat and in the De Haas Van Alphen effect, is considered as a possible cause of cold nuclear fusion, along with the stronger heavy fermion effects directly observed at low temperatures, but localizability of these states remains a problem. Breakdown of the charge invariance of internucleonicforces at very low center-of-mass energies of the order of 1 eV applicable to this form of (non-µ-mesonic) coldfusion, leads to preferential tunneling of neutrons into nearby deuterons, which is suggested as an explanation for the conspicuous absence of neutrons and 3He.