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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.
Alfred Y. Wong
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 39 | Number 1 | January 2001 | Pages 103-110
Topical Review Lectures | doi.org/10.13182/FST01-A11963421
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents a concept of coupling energy to fusion plasmas by spatially distributed and programmable compact energetic neutral beams. These energetic sources are pencil neutral beams with energy from 1 KeV up to 4 MeV. They are formed from the electron transfer between accelerated positive and negative ions in well-proven Radio Frequency Quadrupole (RFQ) structures. Symmetry in positive and negative ion plasmas favors the trapping of both species in adjacent potential wells of a travelling wave. Since this source does not require a large charge-exchange cell and high voltage sources, its compact size allows it to be positioned at multiple locations around the fusion device with various angles of injection.
The motivation for this paper is to usher a new paradigm in the heating, fueling and diagnosis of fusion devices. Large fusion device of meter scale size will need energetic beams to penetrate to its center for heating, fueling and diagnostics. Kinetic instabilities might require ion injection in specific regions of phase space at particular times. Since the beam density scales favorably with decreasing size, we have utilized advances in computer and micro-fabrication and nanotechnology to design a multiple module beam injection system. This approach makes it possible to program each beam module such that beam injection is triggered by special events inside a dynamic fusion plasma.
Current research devices will need inexpensive neutral beams to test their concepts at reasonably high ion energy. This proposed program is designed to demonstrate the versatility of such programmable compact beams in fusion research and ultimate reactor applications. The same principles used to produce these energetic neutral beams are equally applicable to produce neutralized beams that have potential applications in inertial fusion to prevent charge buildup at the target.1
We will first describe our method of producing neutral beam sources based on the wave-acceleration process and the wave enhanced charge-transfer process. We will then describe how our beam sources can be tested in ECRH produced linear magnetized plasma equipped with ICRH and mirror confinement.
The overall objective is to demonstrate the viability and versatility of these compact neutral beams for fusion. Physics issues connected with profile and instability control and the simulation of alpha particles are topics that can be investigated.
