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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.
A. D. Beklemishev, D. I. Skovorodin, K. V. Zaytsev
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 1 | July 2015 | Pages 21-27
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems 2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-883
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In recent experiments on Gas Dynamic Trap (GDT), as well as in earlier experiments on the GOL-3 device, a new and interesting class of oscillations was observed. Its mode structure and frequency resemble that of a sound wave trapped in the mirror cell as a resonator. Such modes can strongly interact with the bounce motion of ions and thus affect the axial confinement in mirror traps. The modes are probably similar to the global acoustic modes (GAMs) in tokamaks. However, there are significant difficulties in reconciling the existence of such modes with conventional theory of plasma waves. In both GOL-3 and GDT in relevant regimes the electron temperature is far below the theoretical limit for existence (let alone weak Landau damping) of ion-sound waves in homogeneous plasma. We explore different models of inhomogeneous anisotropic non-Maxwellian plasma of a mirror trap in search for possible explanations of the observed phenomena.
