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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.
L. Yu, E. Weetjens, J. Perko, D. Mallants
Nuclear Technology | Volume 174 | Number 3 | June 2011 | Pages 411-423
Technical Paper | TOUGH2 Symposium / Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A11749
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two numerical codes, TOUGH2 with the EOS5 module and CODE_BRIGHT, were compared in a confidence building effort for multiphase flow problems in a geological repository in Boom Clay, Belgium. A model study comparison between two codes was carried out through three numerical examples, including a one-dimensional hydro-gas (HG) case, a two-dimensional (2-D) axisymmetrical HG case with a constant hydrogen production rate, and a 2-D axisymmetrical thermo-hydro-gas (THG) case with time-varying heat and gas production rate. This numerical study of modeling the gas-driven migration of pore water under constant or time-dependent thermal conditions in two dimensions is based on the current Belgian multibarrier repository design for geological disposal of high-level waste. Comparison between numerical results demonstrates that the two numerical tools give sufficiently similar results in all three cases, thus providing evidence for the consistency of these tools in solving HG and THG problems in Boom Clay. The differences in the results obtained by the two modeling tools were also discussed.
