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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.
Cyra Neugebauer, Y. Hörstensmeyer, C. Day
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 3 | April 2020 | Pages 215-220
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1704139
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the main design drivers of the EU-DEMO fuel cycle is to avoid unnecessary hydrogen isotope separation. In the tritium plant, this implies a novel functionality for isotope rebalancing (IR) and protium removal (PR). The task of IR is to adjust the deuterium-tritium ratio by several percent gradually over time in order to establish the required fuel mixture composition before reinjection into the torus. The PR is needed to process and separate protium, which inevitably enters the system via outgassing or replacement reactions. The candidate technology for the IR/PR function is temperature swing absorption, which is based on anticyclical operation of two absorption columns with reversed isotope effects. In order to characterize the separation process, a new test rig has been designed and is currently being assembled. This paper describes the principle idea of the process, develops a model to predict the performance, and presents simulation results for a DEMO-relevant gas composition. Palladium and vanadium have been selected for the modeling. It is shown that at the end of one column tritium could be separated with 92.5% purity. At the other column, protium with 46.4% and deuterium with 44.8% purity could be removed. A subsequent parameter study showed that the ideal gas supply would be 40% of the total length of the column and that 22 was the optimal number of cycles before extraction.
