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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.
Jianqing Cai, Huasheng Xie, Yang Li, Michel Tuszewski, Hongbin Zhou, Peipei Chen
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 2 | February 2022 | Pages 149-163
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1964309
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Most tokamak devices including ITER exploit the deuterium-tritium reaction due to its high reactivity, but the wall loading caused by the associated 14-MeV neutrons will limit the further development of fusion performance at high beta. To explore the p-11B fusion cycle, a tokamak system code is extended to incorporate the relativistic bremsstrahlung since the temperature of electrons approaches the electron rest energy. By choosing an optimum p-11B mix and ion temperature, some representative sets of parameters of the p-11B tokamak reactor, whose fusion gain exceeds 1, have been found under the thermal wall loading limit and beta limit when synchrotron radiation loss is neglected. However, the fusion gain greatly decreases when the effect of synchrotron radiation loss is considered. Helium ash also plays an important role in the fusion performance, and we have found that the helium confinement time must be below the energy confinement time to keep the helium concentration ratio in an acceptable range.