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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.
Koichi Maki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 12 | Number 2 | September 1987 | Pages 310-319
Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST87-A11963788
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
When a blanket concept is applied to the actual reactor design, various structural changes such as material thickness, material volume fractions, etc., are made to adjust the overall design to meet lifetime and material stress requirements. After these changes, the new tritium breeding ratio (TBR) is required to be easily and quickly estimated. Hence, an analytical TBR formula was derived by separating absorption, scattering, neutron multiplication, and tritium production cross sections at high energies above the multiplication reaction threshold from those at low energies near the thermal energy. The formula was applied to three blanket types. The TBR values calculated by this formula agreed with those of an ANISN transport code within 5%.
