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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.
Ronald W. Petzoldt
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 34 | Number 3 | November 1998 | Pages 831-839
Inertial Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST98-A11963716
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experiment is being conducted at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to investigate and demonstrate the engineering feasibility of accurately • injecting and tracking IFE targets into a vacuum chamber. A helium gas gun is used to inject non-cryogenic, aluminum and delrin (plastic) target-sized projectiles. They are optically tracked at three locations using photodiodes. An essential part of this experiment is tracking each projectile's position and predicting when and where it will arrive close enough to the driver beam focal spot so that with active beam steering, IFE driver beams can accurately hit each target Although the standard deviation in projectile position in each lateral direction is about 2 mm, projectile position measurements 1 m from the gun barrel have been used to predict position measurements at 3 m from the barrel with standard deviation less than 100 μm in the lateral directions. These results are encouraging and meet the expected beam steering distance and target position prediction accuracy requirements for indirect drive IFE power plants. Later this year, we intend to combine this experiment with a focused ion beam experiment and use real time position calculations to steer the beam through a small hole in the projectile.