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Latest News
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.
J. Konys, W. Krauss, H. Steiner
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 281-288
Fusion Materials | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8915
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
RAFM steels (e.g. Eurofer) are considered as struc-tural material for blanket components of future fusion power plants. One of the envisaged blanket concepts to be tested in ITER foresees the application of a liquid breed-er, the eutectic lead alloy Pb-17Li. Various corrosion experiments have been made in the past, mostly conducted up to temperatures of ca. 480°C, with respect to deter-mine corrosion rates and mechanisms and comparison of the results with earlier tested RAFM-steels of type F82H-mod., Optifer and Manet. In the mean time the envisaged operational temperature increased to around 550°C and flow rates may also have changed. Thus extrapolations of the RAFM-steel corrosion behavior determined in the past to the higher working conditions may be problematic due to large uncertainties in reliability and, additionally, only low knowledge on transport of dissolved components in the Pb-17Li flow is present.Therefore, the development of modeling tools for de-scribing Pb-17Li corrosion was of absolute necessity. The modular structured code MATLIM is based on physical, chemical and thermo-hydraulic parameters and, in the first stage, the development was focused on the dissolu-tion of Eurofer steel and validation with test results ob-tained at 480 and 550°C in the lead-lithium loop PICOLO of FZK.
