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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.
Michal Cihlář, Slavomír Entler, Tomáš Czakoj, Václav Dostál, Jan Prehradný, Pavel Zácha
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 2 | February 2023 | Pages 104-116
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2120301
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Current tritium production might not be enough for all future fusion research reactors. Different approaches for tritium production have been studied in the past, one of which was tritium production using the accelerator-driven subcritical systems. This idea was dismissed in the 1990s as uneconomical when compared to using existing commercial light water reactors. This paper presents changes to the basic idea, mainly the use of a molten spallation target and molten lithium breeding volume. This advanced design is described, optimized for tritium yield using the MCNP 6.2.0 code, and compared between different accelerators.
The optimized configuration consists of a 1-GeV, 200-mA proton accelerator, a molten Pb-Bi eutectic spallation target with a length of 60 cm and a diameter of 75 cm, and molten lithium breeding volume with dimensions of 500 cm in length and 900 cm in diameter. As calculated, the annual production of the proposed accelerator-driven tritium production system could be as high as 350 g of tritium with the optimized configuration.
