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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. P. Smitherman, R. C. Kirkpatrick
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 20 | Number 4 | December 1991 | Pages 838-842
Inertial Confinement Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A11946946
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The problem of energetic alpha particle deposition in a dense, magnetized deuterium-tritium (DT) thermonuclear fuel has been studied numerically for the case of coulomb interactions in cylindrical geometry. This was done by following the particle trajectories initiated at various radii and in different directions through the plasma and its imposed field until they had either left the plasma or deposited all their energy. The resulting complex particle trajectories in the static magnetized fuel make a detailed treatment of the problem computationally intensive. Therefore, we have attempted to use detailed modeling to produce a data base for a neural nets algorithm for incorporation in an ignition critical profile code. While the accuracy of the neural net in reproducing the detailed calculational results is not high, it is approximately 6000 times faster.