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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. Jiang, Y. Y. Li, X. Q. Wu, T. Zhang, B. Lyu, X. Gao, G. S. Xu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 6 | August 2020 | Pages 723-730
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1777670
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Understanding the influence of edge toroidal rotation in confined plasmas on the L-H transition is important for improving the plasma performance of future fusion devices. We report the results of experiments on the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) to study this relationship. We used edge toroidal charge exchange recombination spectroscopy (eCXRS) as a diagnostic to study edge toroidal rotation. By analyzing the contribution of each term in the radial electric field, our experimental results show how the L-H transition depends on the edge toroidal rotation. Generally, the power of the transition increases with increasing edge toroidal rotation. The observed reduction of injected power can be explained by the change of the edge radial electric field. This reduced power threshold at lower toroidal rotation could provide an important benefit for inherently low-rotation plasma devices such as ITER and the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR).