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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.
D. A. Bowers, J. R. Haines, M. D. McSmith, V. D. Lee
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 1138-1142
Ignition Device | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29496
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Compact Ignition Tokamak (CIT) project, led by the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, will employ a double null poloidal divertor as its primary means of energy and particle removal from the plasma. The fusion power handling capability of the divertor may represent the most severe constraint on the operating envelope for CIT. In addition to identifying this envelope based on divertor thermal performance, several studies aimed at improving this performance were examined. The reference divertor design concept employs small modules with pyrolytic graphite (PG) tiles. Studies of the sensitivity of the thermal performance of the passively cooled PG divertor design to separatrix sweeping parameters showed that a single pass sweep is near optimal for CIT conditions. An examination of the thermal performance of alternate materials found that some improvement (up to 20%) in the power handling capability of the divertor may be possible by using higher conductivity forms of PG, although the mechanical properties of these materials are not currently available. Alternate power handling approaches were examined and shown to have no significant improvement in thermal performance over the baseline passively cooled approach.