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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.
Hodaka Osawa, Takayuki Ishibashi, Masami Ohnishi, Kiyoshi Yoshikawa
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1265-1269
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Nonelectric Applications | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A862
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion device is possibly used for portable neutron sources. R. L. Hirsh reported that D-D the neutrons of 1.8 × 108 n/s were produced. Recently, the similar amounts of fusion reactions are observed to occur in IEC devices In the most of IEC devices, since gas pressure is so high that the ions lose their energy by the frequent collisions with the neutral gas. The conditions of the high voltage and the low pressure are preferable because the energy of beam ions is kept very high and used for the fusion reaction more efficiently. It, however, is difficult to produce enough amounts of ions through a glow discharge at the low pressure. One of the solutions is to equip the ion source such as a magnetron near the anode. We have made three-dimensional orbit following code to evaluate the life of the ions produced near the anode surface. The code includes atomic collisions with background neutral gas and indicates the optimal positions to equip ion source which gives longer life of accelerated ions.