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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.
Sadao Uchikawa, Tsutomu Okubo, Yoshihiro Nakano
Nuclear Technology | Volume 172 | Number 2 | November 2010 | Pages 132-142
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A10900
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The FLWR is a boiling water reactor type with a core consisting of hexagonal-shaped fuel assemblies with a triangular-lattice fuel rod configuration, which has been proposed in order to ensure a sustainable energy supply in the future based on well-established light water reactor technologies. This paper proposes a new concept of fuel assembly design named FLWR/MIX. The first stage of FLWR is designed to conserve plutonium effectively with a fissile plutonium conversion ratio of around 1.0, keeping negative void reactivity characteristics. Enriched UO2 fuel rods are arranged in the peripheral region of the assembly, surrounding the mixed oxide (MOX) fuel rods in the central region. Performance evaluation shows that the FLWR/MIX concept is effective for controlling the void reactivity characteristics in the tight-lattice fuel rod configuration and is promising under the framework of the UO2 and MOX fuel technologies and related infrastructures that have been established for the current LWR-MOX utilization.
