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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.
Sung Nam Lee, Nam-Il Tak
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 3 | April 2020 | Pages 238-245
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1705725
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (HTGR) has been selected as one of the next-generation nuclear power plants because of its passive safety features. The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) has been studying how to utilize HTGR efficiently and safely. The HTGR uses graphite as a moderator and helium as a coolant. Once tritium is produced, it is released into the coolant; once released from the core, tritium travels within the primary loop. Because the coolant is gas phase, it is easy to transport to other systems. While it circulates in the primary loop, tritium is involved in processes that include leakage, purification, and permeation. KAERI has been developing a tritium behavior analysis code named TRitium Overall Phenomena analYsis (TROPY) to analyze tritium transport and predict the amount of tritium in the loop in the HTGR core. In this paper, the functions of the TROPY code are introduced, and the amount of tritium in each loop and the amount released into the product hydrogen from the MHTGR 350-MW(thermal) core are explained.
