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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
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Latest News
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.
Jin-Yang Li, Sheng-Miao Guo, Long Gu, You-Peng Zhang, Sheng Yang, Guan Wang, Yu-Jie Tao, Yong-Quan Wang, Hu-Shan Xu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 5 | July 2021 | Pages 340-349
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1904597
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is one of the largest international cooperative projects with many participants from different research groups in institutes and universities all over the world and is expected to achieve nuclear fusion energy output and to be operated in steady state with tritium self-sufficiency. The conventional design of the ITER-type facility always directly faces challenges of operation difficulties in the assembly and maintenance processes considering that there are collision interference and corresponding precision problems within the constrained space; consequently, it is not possible to provide for research purposes qualitative information for human intuition and quantitative contents with professional advice. Therefore, it is necessary to find a better solution for researchers and operators to get a highly efficient group-based work form without being blocked for reasons of geography. In this context, virtual reality technology has been introduced in the digital assembly and maintenance training platform of the ITER-type mock-up at the Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and it has many useful features, including real-time collision detection in assembly tasks with simplified trigger mesh structures by means of the ray-casting method, and three-dimensional visualization of the topological structure in the welding and brazing maintenance using the UV unwrapping and remapping methods considering the conversion process from digital values to gray-scale texture, which can meet the flexible and diverse design requirements and provide feasibility of training at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.