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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.
A. Querol, S. Gallardo, J. Ródenas, G. Verdú
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 63-72
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12271
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Quality control of mammography units is necessary to reduce the dose imparted to women as much as possible. Accurate characterization of the primary X-ray spectra is very useful for this purpose. Obtaining primary spectra normally involves the use of unfolding methods to be applied to pulse-height distributions (PHDs) measured in detector devices. In this work, the modified truncated singular value decomposition, the damped singular value decomposition, and the Tikhonov unfolding methods have been applied to several PHDs simulated with the Monte Carlo code MCNP5. The main goal of this paper is to test the capability of these unfolding methods to reproduce different primary spectra, corresponding to several high voltages and to the different anode materials molybdenum and rhodium. With this aim, an MCNP5 model has been developed to reproduce an actual experimental measurement including the X-ray focus, a Compton spectrometer, and a silicon detector. Quality parameters, such as the half-value layer, homogeneity factor, mean energy, and transmission curve, have been evaluated to see the effect of discrepancies observed between unfolded and theoretical spectra.