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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.
Shiping Wei, Xinyu Sun, Haixia Wang, Jiangtao Jia, Zhibin Chen, Shichao Zhang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 7 | October 2020 | Pages 869-877
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1777668
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) tritium plant has to deal with a larger amount of tritium than ITER. The tritium source term is one of the key issues for safety assessment and operation of the CFETR. In this technical note, the preliminary estimation and safety analysis of the tritium source term for the CFETR tritium plant in normal operation have been performed on compliance with the ongoing plant design. The estimation method adopted is the system dynamics simulation performed by the Tritium Analysis program for fusion System developed by the Frontier Development of Science (FDS) team. The preliminary analysis results show that the storage and delivery system still stores the most amount of tritium. Until after 1 month of operation the plasma-facing material needs to be cleaned in the CFETR corresponding to the 600-g limit. Tritium losses, such as tritium permeation into the coolant and release to building rooms, are of a much smaller amount than tritium decay in the 2-week operation. It is worth noting that the tritium concentration somewhere in the tritium plant can be slightly more than 1 DAC (derived air concentration). These preliminary analysis results could provide some valuable references for the safety design and tritium management of the CFETR tritium plant.