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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.
Jinghua Jiang, Yuanchen Qin, Lili Tong, Xuewu Cao, Songlin Liu, Xiaoman Cheng
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 8 | November 2024 | Pages 960-975
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2271234
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) is presently in the engineering design phase, and it is crucial to establish a thermal-hydraulic safety analysis method. First of all, the identification of phenomena in selected accident scenarios affecting reactor safety performance metrics should be focused on with the phenomenon identification and ranking table (PIRT), in which phenomena related to the thermal-hydraulic safety of the vacuum vessel and related systems are screened, including both design-basis accidents and beyond-design-basis accidents.
The development of this PIRT exercise for CFETR thermal-hydraulic safety is addressed in this study; specifically, the importance ranking and stage of knowledge (SoK) of phenomena in the selected accidents are evaluated by the PIRT panel. The results of the PIRT analysis revealed that there exist certain safety-critical phenomena for which SoK is relatively low despite their perceived significance in safety performance metrics, which include the phase change of coolant, the migration of the multicomponent gas mixture, the migration of radionuclides within confinement, and the dispersion of gaseous radionuclides in the atmosphere. Ongoing research works and follow-up plans to improve the SoK of phenomena are presented.
