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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.
P. K. Sharma
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 65 | Number 1 | January 2014 | Pages 103-119
Lecture | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-639
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) system, which is a mature, robust, and reliable heating and current drive system in a large number of tokamaks, is designed, developed, and being commissioned on the steady-state superconducting tokamak (SST-1) for driving 220 kA of plasma current, noninductively, for 1000 s, at nominal plasma parameters (plasma density ∼2×1019 m−3, temperature ∼1 keV, toroidal magnetic field ∼3 T), using four 3.7-GHz, 500-kW continuous wave (cw) klystrons. It employs a conventional grill antenna to launch toroidal lower hybrid waves asymmetrically, with a parallel refractive index N∥ of approximately 2.25 at 90-deg relative phasing of adjacent channels. The system is very complex and requires interfacing with several subsystems such as high-power radio-frequency systems, high-voltage power supply systems, auxiliary power supply systems, efficient thermal management systems, complex networks of transmission line systems, and robust and reliable data acquisition and control systems. With the SST-1 LHCD system as a case study, this lecture gives a broad overview of the physics and design layout of LHCD systems. It addresses cutting-edge technologies employed in realizing the system and gives the present status and advances made for cw operation. The challenges and opportunities are also highlighted.