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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.
Y. F. Chen, R. J. Sheu, S. H. Jiang, J. N. Wang, U. T. Lin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 343-350
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-A12306
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Based on the Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling (CADIS) methodology, MAVRIC is a new computational sequence in the SCALE6 code package that is designed to perform efficient Monte Carlo simulation for a complicated and difficult shielding problem. This study aimed to evaluate the performance of MAVRIC with the latest cross-section library in calculating the surface dose rates of a realistic spent-fuel storage cask. Detailed dose rate profiles over the cask side and top surfaces were calculated, and the results were compared with our previous work using SAS4 and MCNP. In order to duplicate the same source model, the MAVRIC code has been modified to accommodate a user-defined axial source distribution. The comparison among the three codes was evaluated in terms of their accuracies and computational efficiencies. For the gamma-ray sources, the MAVRIC-calculated results are more accurate than SAS4 and consistent with those predicted by the continuous-energy MCNP calculations. Meanwhile, its computational efficiencies are comparable to the performance of the TORT-coupled MCNP calculations. For the fuel neutron source, the MAVRIC calculation with broad-group cross sections cannot give satisfactory result, and its computational performance is also a factor of [approximately]10 less efficient than that of TORT-coupled MCNP. With a fine-group cross-section library, MAVRIC can provide a better prediction but still underestimates the surface dose rates of the cask by 15 to 30%.