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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.
Kusuma Dewi, Akira Hasegawa, Satoshi Otsuka, Katsunori Abe
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 39 | Number 2 | March 2001 | Pages 585-589
Fusion Materials | doi.org/10.13182/FST01-A11963300
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In ITER, austenitic stainless steels are under consideration as a blanket structural material for temperature below 200°C. Transmuted helium will be also produced in austenitic stainless steels by high-energy neutron irradiation, and it will affect microstructural development including grain boundary segregation. In this paper, the effects of helium on grain boundary segregation in austenitic stainless steels are studied using ion-irradiation experiment.
The result showed that the onset of radiation induced segregation (RIS) by proton irradiation occurs somewhere between 0.1 and 0.5 dpa. Helium pre-implantation significantly reduced RIS of the major alloying elements. Mechanisms are discussed. Comparison of this result with neutron irradiated induced segregation showed qualitative agreement in the data trends. However, a large amount of segregation was observed in the proton irradiated 304 austenitic stainless steels specimens.