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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. G. Clemmer, D. K. Sze, P. E. Blackburn, E. VanDeventer, V. A. Maroni
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 1612-1618
Material and Tritium | Proceedings of the Ninth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Oak Brook, Illinois, October 7-11, 1990) | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29572
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A 2:1 mixture of LiF and BeF2 (FLIBE), is a potential tritium breeder material for fusion reactors, in particular, the Advanced Safe Pool Immersed Reactor (ASPIRE). A limited experimental campaign was conducted in an effort to test the postulates of the ASPIRE concept: namely, that MoF6 is effective in controlling the tritium species by maintaining the TF form and that MoF6 can serve as a source to plate out Mo on surfaces, thereby making the FLIBE system compatible with the corrosive TF. It was demonstrated experimentally that successive additions of MoF6 achieved quantitative (i.e., greater than 99.7%) conversion of H2 to HF. Thus, MoF6 is effective in controlling the tritium species. The degree of conversion of H2 to HF demonstrates that HF does not attack MO to form H2. This supports the postulate that the system is compatible with Mo. Thus, if it were possible to plate out and maintain a coating of Mo on all surfaces in contact with the FLIBE system, the ASPIRE concept could work. Thermodynamic calculations also confirmed that MoF6 should be capable of quantitatively (>99.9%) converting H2 to HF. There is both experimental and theoretical evidence that a number of MoFx species are present in both the gas phase and the FLIBE solution.