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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.
Rongbao Zhu, Xiaozhong Wang, Feng Lu, Dazhao Ding, Jianyu He, Hengjun Liu, Jincai Jiang, Guoan Chen, Yuan Yuan, Liucheng Yang, Zhonglin Chen, Howard O. Menlove
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 20 | Number 3 | November 1991 | Pages 349-353
Technical Note on Cold Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29675
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A high-level neutron coincidence counter equipped with 18 3He tubes and a JSR-11 shift register unit with a detection limit of 0.20 n/s for a 2-h run is used to study the neutron signals in D2 gas experiments. Different material pretreatments are selected to review the changes in frequency and size of the neutron burst production. Experimental sequence is deliberately designed to distinguish the neutron burst from fake signals, e.g., electronic noise pickup, cosmic rays, and other sources of environmental background. Ten batches of dry fusion samples are tested, among them, seven batches with neutron burst signals that occur roughly from −100°C to near room temperature. In the first four runs of a typical sample batch, seven neutron bursts are observed with neutron numbers from 15 to 482, which are 3 and 75 times, respectively, higher than the uncertainty of the background. The samples seem to be inactive after four or five temperature cycles, and the inactive samples could be reactivated by degassing and recharging of deuterium. The same anomalous phenomena were observed in theMentou Valley Underground Laboratory situated 580 m below ground.