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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. Carrera, W. D. Booth, J. L. Anderson, T. Bauer, D. Coffin, T. A. Parish†
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 1629-1633
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-A29574
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper outlines the preliminary conceptual design of a minimum—cost tritium system for a basic ignition experiment whose objective is to produce and control fusion ignited plasmas for scientific study. A system without tritium recycling and tritium reprocessing is envisioned. The fueling requirements can be satisfied by using a tritium storage tank with 20 kCi absorbed in a uranium bed which will be delivered to the facility every month (about 100 ignition pulses). Fueling needs will be supplied by thermal heating of the uranium bed and subsequent gas puffing of the tritium into the tokamak vacuum vessel. A modular vacuum pumping system is considered (6 × 880 ℓ/sec). Tritiated liquid effluents are eliminated by using oilless—bearing pumps. A thin carbon film is applied by glow discharge over the first wall to contain the tritium in the plasma chamber (by saturating the C film). The overall cost of the tritium system is estimated to be less than $3 million.