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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.
B. J. Le Garrec, G. L. Bourdet, V. Cardinali
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 369-374
High Average Power Laser and Other IFE R&D | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8929
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The real advantage of the laser driver as compared to other drivers is its ability to provide a high quality focal spot on target. Heat generation in solid-state media has always been recognized as a limiting feature because at high repetition rate, the quality of this focal spot depends on the beam wave-front distortions. It is not easy to design the driver baseline because there are too many different parameters to deal with. In this paper, we introduce two figures of merit that show that Yb doped ceramics (either garnets or sesquioxides) are promising laser materials opening new fields during the research phase to demonstrate ignition and fusion gain (including the fast ignitor concept). When driven at low temperature (cryogenic cooling), all of the operational features of the laser amplifier can be demonstrated at an aperture scale of only 10-15 cm.
