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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.
Takashi Kato, Kunihiro Matsui, Susumu Shimamoto, Kazuhiko Nishida, Tadaaki Honda, Kazuya Hamada, Hiroshi Tsuji, Neil Michel, Kiyoshi Yoshida
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 30 | Number 3 | December 1996 | Pages 1253-1257
Fusion Magnet Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A11963120
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the safety analysis for superconducting magnet system in International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) was carried out. The ITER cryostat will hold many superconducting magnets, such as twenty of toroidal field coils, a central solenoid coil, and seven poloidal coils. Loss of vacuum of the cryostat was considered as the worst assumption and the safety analysis of the magnets was examined when the assumption would be occurred. Accordingly, the loss of vacuum will cause the loss of thermal shield vacuum for the magnets and then a large heat transfer will be generated in the cryostat The magnet pressure and temperature will rise, bringing the magnets to quench. Such behavior was simulated by using a developed computer-aided calculation code. As a result of the calculation, a catastrophic phenomenon doesn't appear in the assumption. It is observed that a quasi-stable state, where the magnet temperature is kept to be less than 7 K, is maintained for more than 600 seconds. Thus, the magnet current can be slowly discharged like as the ordinal operation without magnet quench even in such worst assumption due to a large volume of the cryostat.