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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.
D. Hernández-Arriaga, D. M. Ventura-Ovalle, M. Nieto-Pérez
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 2 | February 2019 | Pages 148-159
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2018.1554390
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Using infrastructure from the old TPM-1 tokamak in Mexico, there is an ongoing project to bring it back into operation, but with important upgrades. One of the main planned improvements will be the substitution of the continuous winding used to generate the toroidal field (TF) with a set of discrete circular coils. The new toroidal magnetic field configuration should also allow stable operation of the machine at plasma currents of up to 50 kA for 30 ms. At this design stage, decisions regarding number and characteristics of the coils and power delivery strategy to them need to be addressed. In the present paper, a study regarding the parameters required for the generation of the adequate TF are presented, including the process for determining number of TF coils, their size and position, the required current pulse for operation, and a potential strategy for generating such pulse based on passive pulse-forming networks.
