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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.
Hiroyuki Shidara, Kazunobu Nagasaki, Kinzo Sakamoto, Hidetoshi Yukimoto, Masahiko Nakasuga, Fumimichi Sano, Katsumi Kondo, Tohru Mizuuchi, Hiroyuki Okada, Sakae Besshou, Shinji Kobayashi, Yoshito Manabe, Hayato Kawazome, Tasho Takamiya, Yoshinori Ohno, Hiroyasu Kubo, Yusuke Nishioka, Masao Iriguchi, Masashi Kaneko, Koichi Takahashi, Yohei Fukagawa, Yuya Morita, Masaki Yamada, Shingo Nakazawa, Shintaro Tsuboi, Shigeru Nishio, Victor Orlov, Alexander Pavelyev, Alexander Tolkachev, Victor Tribaldos, Tokuhiro Obiki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 1 | January 2004 | Pages 41-48
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A424
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A 70-GHz electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) system has been constructed in a helical-axis heliotron device, Heliotron J, in order to realize localized heating and current drive experiments. Since the Heliotron J plasma has a three-dimensional complex shape, the ECRH system is designed to satisfy the requirement of wide steering capability in both the toroidal and poloidal directions. The low-power transmission test shows that the beam radius of the focused Gaussian beam is 22 mm at the magnetic axis, which is small enough compared to the averaged minor plasma radius (170 mm), and the launching system covers a wide toroidal steering range from perpendicular to tangential injection by replacing the steering plane mirror. Since these characteristics satisfy the condition for controlling the power localization in the three-dimensional helical-axis configuration, it is possible to explore the on- and off-axis heating over most of the plasma radius (0 < r/a < 0.7) and the electron cyclotron current drive. In the high-power transmission test, the transmission efficiency of the 20-m corrugated waveguide is 92%, and the available output power to the vacuum vessel is up to 0.4 MW. Plasma production and heating are successfully performed using this ECRH system.
