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Latest News
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.
B. A. Nelson, T. R. Jarboe, D. J. Orvis, A. K. Martin, J. Xie, C. Zhang, L. Zhou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 27 | Number 3 | April 1995 | Pages 333-336
Compact Torus (Field-Reversed Configuration, Spheromak) Concepts | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A11947099
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Coaxial helicity injection is used to form and sustain low aspect ratio tokamaks at currents of up to 250 kA in the Helicity Injected Tokamak experiment. Plasma currents can be sustained at an average of 225 kA for 2 ms, with on axis electron thermal energies up to 80 eV, or for longer times, 140 kA average for 7 ms, many resistive diffusion times. Spectroscopic measurements of the higher current discharges suggest burn-through of oxygen impurities. These plasmas have a rotating n = 1 distortion, appearing only on the outer, bad-curvature region. Equilibria reconstruction, fitting to experimental data, shows tokamak q profiles achieved with hollow plasma current profiles.
