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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.
Jie Li, Jie Zhang, Yang Qiu, Liangliang Zhang, Changle Liu, Xiang Gao
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 1 | January 2020 | Pages 70-77
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1610320
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The breeding material ratio (BMR) makes a significant impact on the tritium breeding ratio (TBR) to the fusion blanket due to the material fraction influence inside the blanket interior. The qualitative study on the BMR-related TBR issues are focused on the two cases of water-cooled blanket modules: the mixture blanket structure and the multilayer blanket case. The study indicates that TBR is a unique value in accordance with one BMR value in the mixture blanket. Moreover, a systematic scheme on TBR estimation based on multiple variable combinations is carried out for the multilayer model. It is found that the blanket local TBR would vary along with BMR increasing, and that high TBRs are obtained at BMR in the range of 0.08 to 0.12 for the two cases. In particular, the maximum TBR occurs when the BMR is in the range of 0.09 to 0.1. Furthermore, TBR variation due to BMR change induced by blanket macrofactors, like material type, material ratio, material structure, etc., is defined using the universal function solution. These results would be more important to the breeding blanket design and optimization since they would affect the blanket structure concepts and their TBR estimations. Hence, the blanket BMR issues are important concerns on the road toward an advanced blanket system for the Chinese Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) at the present pre-engineering stages.
