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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.
C. G. Bathke, R. A. Krakowski, K. F. Schoenberg
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 15 | Number 2 | March 1989 | Pages 1082-1087
Plasma Heating and Current Drive — II | doi.org/10.13182/FST89-A39836
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The property of reversed-field pinches (RFPs) to relax to a near-minimum-energy state is the basis of oscillating-field current drive (OFCD), wherein plasma current is driven by modulating in quadrature the external toroidal and poloidal magnetic fields. Coupled plasma/circuit OFCD simulations of RFPs ranging from present experiments (ZT-P and ZT-40M) to the reactor (TITAN) indicate that the drive frequency and the amplitude of the plasma-current oscillations decrease and the “wall-plug” current-drive efficiency increases with decreased plasma resistance so that minimum frequencies (∼25 Hz) and plasma-current amplitudes (∼1.6%) and maximum efficiencies (∼0.3 A/W) are attained in the reactor regime. Methods for minimizing the reactive powers and for optimizing the current-drive efficiency for OFCD in RFPs have been identified.
