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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.
Gennadij T. Razdobarin, Eugene E. Mukhin, Vladimir V. Semenov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 35 | Number 1 | January 1999 | Pages 389-392
Poster Presentations | doi.org/10.13182/FST99-A11963891
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
ITER divertor operation is dominated by the necessity to exhaust around 200MW power via the scrape-off layer. A large fraction of the input power must be irradiated by the impurities either intrinsic or seeded. It is important that the radiation source be well distributed over the entire divertor plasma. The plasma detachment at the divertor target should be precisely adjusted as to enable a partially attached operating, that is detached near the separatrix strike point and attached further out in the scrape-off layer. To provide information on key fenomena which may limit the divertor performance is the challenging task for diagnostics in ITER.
The reliable Tc, nc profile measurements in the divertor upstream (near X-point) and downstream (divertor bottom) regions address the highly promising Thomson scattering diagnostics. The high resolution time-of-flight LIDAR Thomson scattering for the X-point and the conventional Thomson scattering technique for the divertor leg fit the reference divertor configuration with minimal impact on ITER design.
