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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.
Qiuran Wu, Peng Lu, Hua Du, Yu Zheng, Songlin Liu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 3 | April 2023 | Pages 274-283
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2120304
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Radiation field analyses of the fusion reactor are vital to machine design and personal/environmental irradiation protection. Owing to the complicated and toroidal symmetry of fusion reactors, these nuclear analyses have been performed based on a sector model with reflecting boundary conditions. However, not all sections of a fusion reactor are symmetrical in the toroidal direction, particularly the neutron flow channels introduced by auxiliary systems from which particles can leak directly from the plasma. Hence, the reflecting boundary conditions cannot accurately describe the particle transport. Consequently, radiation field analyses based on a full-sector model must be performed to verify the results obtained. In this regard, the neutronics model of CFETR has been built in 360 deg. Meanwhile, the development of the automatic geometry conversion platform cosVMPT has enabled an entire 360-deg model of the CFETR to be established. The model contains all primary components and the outer house building. Sixteen upper/lower ports and six equatorial ports are included, in which two of them are slanted for neutral beam injection, whereas the other ports are filled with a shielding block. The on-the-fly (OTF) global variance reduction method is utilized to accelerate neutron/photon coupling transport. The results show that cosVMPT and the OTF method are reliable, and that the obtained neutron/photon flux is asymmetric outside the main machine. The computational results of the 360-deg model are compared with those of the sector model such that the application scope of simplifying the modeling and calculation using the sector model can be further confirmed.