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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.
Krystyna Cedzynska, Fritz G. Will
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 22 | Number 1 | August 1992 | Pages 156-159
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/FST92-A30065
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A closed-system procedure for the analysis of tritium in palladium has been developed that has a sensitivity and accuracy of 5 × 107 tritium atoms, corresponding to one tritium atom per 1013 palladium atoms for a typical 0.1-g palladium sample. The technique involves palladium dissolution in acid, distillation of the tritiated water, and catalytic oxidation of tritium gas to tritiated water, followed by liquid scintillation counting. This technique is not subject to false tritium findings from a variety of chemical factors or environmental influences that may affect the results of open-system analytical procedures. The closed-system procedure has been applied to nearly 100 as-manufactured palladium wire samples of various lots and sizes from two different sources. None of these samples show any tritium contamination within the detection limit of 5 × 107 tritium atoms. By comparison, others, employing an open-system procedure, have reported tritium contamination in as-manufactured palladium 10000 times larger than the values obtained by this closed system method.
