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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.
Wei Shen, Dimitar Altiparmakov
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 174 | Number 2 | June 2013 | Pages 109-134
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE12-42
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents a multicell correction method that has been developed and implemented in the code suite WIMS-AECL/RFSP to capture the effects of the lattice-cell neighborhood while maintaining the basic structure of the single-cell-based reactor-physics methodology traditionally used for Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU)-reactor calculations for decades. To validate the effectiveness in treating the core-reflector interface heterogeneity as well as the checkerboard-voiding scenario, the results of WIMS-AECL/RFSP calculations (with and without the multicell correction) are compared with the results of MCNP5 full-core calculations for CANDU-type reactors. The presented results show that the multicell correction method is effective, generic, and capable of capturing the heterogeneity effects of the neighborhood in CANDU-type reactors.
