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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.
Bo Zeng, Zijia Zhao, Zhong Chen, Dongmei Pan, Zhongliang Lv, Yanyun Ma
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 2 | February 2021 | Pages 88-97
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1850158
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fusion power, which generates electricity from the heat of fusion reactions, has the potential to solve the future energy crisis; hence, methods have been developed to study fusion reactions in a fusion reactor. For neutronic analyses of a fusion reactor, the reaction rate should be precisely calculated. The traditional calculation method has some defects. First, the deuterium-tritium fusion reaction cross-section data used are of the semiclassical model described by Gamow theory, which provides relatively accurate cross sections at energies below several hundreds of kilo-electron-volts in a center-of-mass frame. However, when energies increase, the data may be inaccurate. The ENDF/B-VI database provides accurate energies below 30 MeV. Since tokamak research always aims to raise the temperature inside, the ENDF/B-VI database may be more accurate at high temperatures and fit the research better. Second, adjacent plasmas with different temperatures and densities may influence each other and finally influence the reaction rate, which is not taken into account in the traditional calculation method. In this work, a numerical algorithm based on the ENDF/B-VI database employs both the Monte Carlo method and the discrete ordinates (SN) method, which is used to simulate the transportation process to obtain more accurate reaction rate results. Parameters of the European demonstration fusion power plant (DEMO) A-mode are used to calculate the reaction rate by both the traditional method and the new algorithm. The differences of the results are shown, and the total reaction rate of the new algorithm is 4.23% higher than that of the traditional method.