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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.
Takumi Hayashi, Junzou Amano, Kenji Okuno, Yuji Naruse
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 21 | Number 2 | March 1992 | Pages 845-849
Material; Storage and Processing | doi.org/10.13182/FST92-A29854
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to discuss the long-term reliability and safety of zirconium-cobalt (ZrCo) alloy for tritium (T) use, the release behavior of decay helium (3He) from ZrCo tritide has been investigated for one and a half years with a radio-gaschromatograph. The results show that the release fractions of the total decay 3He in ZrCo tritide are less than 3 % and has been almost constant for 18 months under the following conditions : the operating temperatures = 293 ∼ 523 K, the atom ratios (T/ZrCo) = 0.3 ∼ 1.4, and the number of hydrogenation-dehydrogenation cycles before tritiation = 1 ∼ 10. Moreover, residual decay 3He was not released even if ZrCo was heated to 873 K, though most of the tritium was released. It became clear that the decay 3He was quite immovable in ZrCo tritide under these experimental conditions.
