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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.
D. Driemeyer, D. Bowers, J. Davis, D. Kubik, H. Mantz, M. McSmith, T. Rigney, C. Baxi, L. Sevier, M. Carelli, L. Green, D. Ruzic, D. Hayden, M. Gabler, J. Yuen
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 26 | Number 3 | November 1994 | Pages 603-610
Divertor Experiment and Technology | Proceedings of the Eleventh Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy New Orleans, Louisiana June 19-23, 1994 | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A40223
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the key challenges in designing the next generation tokamaks is the development of plasma facing components (PFC's) that can withstand the severe environmental conditions at the plasma edge. The most intensely loaded element of the PFC's is the divertor. The divertor must handle high fluxes of energetic plasma particles and electromagnetic radiation without excessive impurity build-up in the plasma core. It must also remove helium ash while recirculating a large fraction of the unburned hydrogen fuel so that vacuum pumping requirements are not excessive. The gas-dynamic mode of divertor operation proposed for ITER expands the divertor design window to include several alternate heat sink and armor materials that were not feasible for the previous high recycling divertor approach. In particular, beryllium armor can now be considered with copper, niobium or vanadium structural materials cooled by liquid metal or possibly helium in addition to water. This paper presents some of the results achieved under ongoing ITER Plasma Facing Components research and development tasks. The overall effort involves U.S. industry, universities and national laboratories and is directed towards developing and/or testing: (1) ductile beryllium and beryllium joining techniques; (2) prototype divertor component design, fabrication and testing; (3) fiber-reinforced composites for beryllium and carbon; (4) beryllium plasma spray processes; (5) compliant layers for PFC armor attachment; (6) sacrificial armor layers for the divertor end-plates; and (7) tritium permeation and inventory in proposed PFC materials and components. The paper focuses on work being conducted by the industrial support team consisting of McDonnell Douglas Aerospace, Ebasco, General Atomics, Rocketdyne, University of Illinois and Westinghouse.