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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.
Hideaki Matsuura, Yasuyuki Nakao, Yutaka Tanaka, Kazuhiko Kudo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 24 | Number 1 | August 1993 | Pages 17-27
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST93-A30171
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Formation of an effective ion tail due to neutral beam injection heating during startup in D-3He plasmas is investigated. The main idea is to reduce the energy input required for startup heating as well as the 14-MeV neutron yield by creating an effective tail The optimal beam injection energy and beam species are first estimated by solving the steady-state Fokker-Planck equations for the injected species and for tritons. The startup of D-3He plasma is simulated by simultaneously solving the time-dependent power balance and particle conservation equations together with the Fokker-Planck equations. As a result of tail formation in the fuel ion distribution, both the total input energy and the 14-MeV neutron yield during the startup phase are reduced by ∼20% from the values for Maxwellian plasma.