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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.
R. D. Deranian et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 768-773
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Plasma Engineering, Heating, Current Drive, and Control | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A779
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An extensive set of software tools for integrated plasma control, developed and validated on the DIII-D tokamak, has been applied to several nextgeneration fusion device designs including KSTAR, EAST, and ITER. These devices will require elements of integrated plasma control in order to achieve high reliability advanced tokamak or burning plasma operation. Plasma Control Systems (PCS) based on the DIII-D PCS have been designed for each of these devices. The integrated plasma control approach uses validated physics models to design controllers for plasma shape and both axisymmetric and nonaxisymmetric MHD instabilities and confirms control performance by operating actual machine control hardware and software against detailed tokamak system simulations. The physics-based models include conductors, diagnostics, power supplies, and both linear and nonlinear plasma models. These models can be implemented in the detailed control simulations to verify event handling and demonstrate functioning of control action under realistic hardware (CPU and network) conditions. Results of simulations are shown, illustrating control performance characteristics produced by each device design, engineering choices, and control system algorithms and hardware. Such simulations allow confirmation of performance prior to actual implementation on an operating device.