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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.
Wilfred Anthony Cooper, Sergi Ferrando i Margalet, Simon J. Allfrey, Johann Kißlinger, Horst F. G. Wobig, Yoshiro Narushima, Shoichi Okamura, Chihiro Suzuki, Kiyomasa Y. Watanabe, Kozo Yamazaki, Maxim Yu. Isaev
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 2 | September 2004 | Pages 365-377
Technical Papers | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A576
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The impact of the bootstrap current is investigated on the equilibrium properties of a two-period quasi-axisymmetric stellarator reactor with free boundary and on the corresponding ideal magnetohydrodynamic stability properties. Although the magnetic field strength B spectrum is dominated by a m/n = 1/0 component, the discrete filamentary coils trigger some small-amplitude symmetry-breaking components that can disturb the quasi-symmetry of B. Finite causes the plasma column to shift outward in the absence of bootstrap current. With a self-consistent bootstrap current in the 1/ regime, the plasma becomes more elongated and more distorted in the horizontally elongated up-down symmetric cross section. At [approximately equal to] 3.25%, the plasma can be restored to its near-vacuum shape with the application of a vertical field with coil currents 20% of those of the modular coils, but at the expense of a significant mirror component in the B-field spectrum. The bootstrap current causes the rotational transform profile to increase above the critical resonant value (c = 1/2 for 1.1%) and combines with the Pfirsch-Schlüter current to destabilize a m/n = 2/1 external kink mode for 1.8%.