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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.
R. Giannella, M. Roccella
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 18 | Number 2 | September 1990 | Pages 201-222
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST90-A29294
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An analysis (in terms of different figures of merit) of the performances of several recently proposed tokamaks (IGNITOR, Compact Ignition Tokamak, IGNITEX, JIT, Enhanced Tokamak, Next European Torus, Candor) has been performed. The analysis was carried out according to different scaling laws and in various operating scenarios (temperature and density profile control, low and high energy confinement modes). In the plasma model, profile consistency between current density and temperature was assumed, taking into account neoclassical conductivity and the related physical constraints. The profiles obtained simulate the experimental data fairly well for both lower and higher collisional plasmas. A code was developed for this purpose that produces the stationary state contours for a given tokamak at different additional power levels once the scaling law is fixed. For a given machine, automatic analyses of these diagrams can be carried out for different confinement scaling laws and operating conditions. For a given scaling law and operating scenario, the code scans the configuration space looking for the “machines” capable of reaching ignition according to some simple technological constraints. The results for the most conservative situation are also shown.