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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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.
N. W. Eidietis
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 7 | November 2021 | Pages 738-744
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1889919
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Disruptions present a great challenge to achieving an economically viable commercial tokamak fusion reactor. Disruption handling, including prevention, mitigation, and resilient design, must be incorporated into future reactor designs at the same priority as core performance and steady-state heat flux removal. Prevention requires avoiding unstable regimes; actively stabilizing instabilities if they do appear; or, if those steps should fail, terminating the plasma-controlled rampdown. Mitigation is a last resort that utilizes massive impurity injection to reduce a damaging concentration of thermal and mechanical loads. Extremely robust disruption prevention will be of paramount importance to ensure high duty factor and capital return on the reactor investment, but the reactor environment poses significant technical challenges exceeding those in ITER. The long-term mission of a commercial reactor motivates investment in passive resilient design to survive disruptions in the absence of active intervention.