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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.
T. Numakura, T. Cho, J. Kohagura, M. Hirata, R. Minami, K. Yatsu, S. Miyoshi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 1 | January 2003 | Pages 222-224
Stability | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A11963599
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The effects of the thermal-barrier potentials ɸb on the central-cell electron energy confinement are theoretically and experimentally investigated in the GAMMA 10 tandem mirror. In particular, the scaling of the central-cell electron temperatures Te with “the central-cell electron-confining potentials” ɸb is studied on the basis of the electron energy-balance equation and the generalized Pastukhov theory. The obtained theoretical scaling of Te with ɸb is then compared with the experimentally observed relation between these two parameters. In GAMMA 10, the main tandem-mirror operations are characterized in terms of(i) a high-potential mode having kV-order plasma-confining potentials, and (ii) a hot-ion mode yielding fusion neutrons with 10-20 keV bulk-ion temperatures. In this report, the scaling of Te with ɸb covering over these two representative operational modes is investigated, since the scalings of Te or the dominant parameters which determine Te have been remained for a long time as an unresolved important issue for tandem-mirror plasmas. It is found that the data in the two representative operational modes of the high-potential and hot-ion modes in the GAMMA 10 tandem mirror are in good agreement with the theoretically derived scaling formula, though the heating-source parameter dependence in the electron energy-balance equation is quite different in the two modes.
