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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.
Sandro M. O. L. Schneider, Patrick Burkhalter
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 4 | May 2020 | Pages 379-383
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1712990
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
When it comes to the task of handling gaseous tritium, the challenge is to reduce losses of this precious, gaseous, hydrogen isotope. The driving force to achieve this is based on three requests:
1. Improve the safety and efficiency by spotting losses of gaseous tritium.
2. Embed the real-time tritium monitoring in the process and safety automation.
3. Be transparent in the whole workflow for its own safety and for auditable compliance.
Many good and accepted single devices and working procedures have been proposed and used already.
By introducing the Smolsys Ltd.® Radio Medical Container (RMC) method, a team at Smolsys Ltd. has brought the efficient and safe handling of tritium to a new performance level. The idea of the RMC method is to combine many of those approved single devices for gaseous tritium handling and link the workflow logically and digitally in a well-controllable confinement. In the case of the RMC, the working space or room is a container in which the working places and machines are run; hence, the room itself becomes part of the production process and tritium machine. It is monitored and controlled by the process logic and as such becomes a smart and digitized RMC for more safety and efficiency in tritium handling. This paper presents the RMC based on a realized tritium-processing factory in Switzerland. This RMC is a fully engineered tritium facility with a designed and engineered safety factor and is very flexible to be customized. The RMC is also transportable since standard container sizes are used.