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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.
Sergei A. Zimin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 20 | Number 2 | September 1991 | Pages 144-163
Technical Paper | Shielding | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29686
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The radiation shield for the toroidal field (TF) coils in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is optimized using one-dimensional calculations. The ANISN code with the VITAMIN-C group constant library and MAKLIB-IV response library are used for the calculations. Two ways of evaluating the total heating in the TF coils are presented. These methods, being standard approaches, use the results of both one-dimensional shielding calculations and three-dimensional calculations f or the neutron wall load distribution on the reactor first wall, and they seem to be useful f or future work on ITER and ITER-like projects such as the Next European Torus (NET), Fusion Experimental Reactor (FER), and Compact Ignition Tokamak (CIT). The main results of the optimization and the total heating evaluation are compared with U.S. and European team results. The local nuclear responses in the TF coils remain within the prescribed limits everywhere. The total nuclear heating in the ITER TF coils is within the 50-kW limit in the physics phase using either the U.S. or the USSR blanket concept. The total nuclear heating in the ITER TF coils during the technology phase is expected to be ∼20% lower than that in the physics phase.