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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.
Ronald F. Schmitt
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 57 | Number 2 | February 2010 | Pages 152-161
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A9369
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two new methods for designing modular stellarator coils are presented. Stellarator coils provide necessary magnetic field to produce the plasma shape for a desired magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equilibrium. The methods optimize a continuous current on a surface - i.e., coil current is represented by a continuous-current sheet on a toroidal winding surface - and the process of coil cutting is not addressed. In contrast to previously published continuous-current methods that optimize coil current by minimizing the flux at the plasma boundary, the new methods presented in this paper search for optimal solutions by minimizing the displacement of the plasma boundary, i.e., the last closed magnetic surface. The physical displacement of the plasma boundary is computed from the magnetic field normal using linear MHD perturbation theory. A comparison with two similar continuous-current codes is given in terms of both methodology and results. The new codes show modest improvement over previously published continuous-current codes.
