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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.
Misaki Sato, Hiromichi Uchimura, Kensuke Toda, Tomonori Tokunaga, Hideo Watanabe, Naoaki Yoshida, Yuji Hatano, Ryuta Kasada, Takuya Nagasaka, Akihiko Kimura, Yasuhisa Oya, Kenji Okuno
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 3 | April 2015 | Pages 551-554
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T77
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The deuterium retention behavior for the Vacuum Plasma Spraying (VPS) tungsten (W) coating was studied to demonstrate the tritium retention as a function of heating temperature. It was found that two major deuterium desorption stages were observed at the temperature regions of 400 - 700 K (Stage 1) and 900 - 1100 K (Stage 2), considering that Stage 1 was linked to the desorption of deuterium trapped by near surface and intrinsic defects, and Stage 2 was related to the desorption of deuterium bound to impurities as C-D bonds. By heating the sample above 673 K, the major peak of C-1s was shifted from C-O bond to C-C bond, where the retention of deuterium as Stage 2 was increased. Therefore it was indicating that the hydrogen isotope retention was controlled by the amount of C-C bond in VPS, most of which was contaminated during the VPS coating process. The comparison of several samples (VPS-W with shading, VPS-W without shading and Polycrystalline W (PCW)) shows that the carbon impurity has a large affinity with deuterium and make stable trapping states compared to that with intrinsic defects and grain boundaries. However, most of them was reduced by heating at 1173 K. Therefore, heating treatment is quite important to get rid of carbon impurities and refrain higher tritium retention in VPS.