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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.
Duk Jin Kim, Jong Hyun Kim, K. F. Barry, Ho-Young Kwak
Nuclear Technology | Volume 176 | Number 3 | December 2011 | Pages 337-351
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A13312
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Thermoeconomic analysis was performed for high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs) coupled with a steam methane reforming (SMR) plant in order to estimate the hydrogen production cost. Two possible HTGRs, a modified Brayton cycle HTGR (GT-HTGR) coupled with an SMR plant and a modified steam cycle HTGR (SC-HTGR) coupled with an SMR plant, were considered in this study. In these analyses, mass and energy conservation were applied strictly to each component of the system. Also, quantitative balances of the exergy and the exergetic cost for each component and for the whole system were carefully considered. The hydrogen production cost was estimated to be about $0.825/kg [$7.25/one million Btu (MM Btu)] for the GT-HTGR-SMR system and $0.728/kg ($6.41/MM Btu) for the ST-HTGR-SRM system with a uranium fuel cost of $8.40/MWh. The hydrogen production cost estimated in this study is considerably less than the economic target of $1.70/kg ($14.96/MM Btu), indicating that hydrogen production using HTGR with an SMR plant has great economic potential.
