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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.
Rui Hu, Mujid S. Kazimi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 177 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 8-28
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A13324
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The TRACE/PARCS code was applied in this work to examine the validity of the coupled three-dimensional thermal-hydraulics and neutronics system analysis codes for boiling water reactor stability analysis. The evaluation was performed against the Ringhals-1 stability tests and compared with the frequency domain analysis using the code STAB. A comprehensive assessment of modeling choices for the TRACE stability analysis has been made, including effects of time-space discretization and numerical schemes, thermal-hydraulics channel grouping, neutronics modeling, and control system modeling. It was found that with careful control of numerical diffusion, the predictions from TRACE agree reasonably well with the Ringhals-1 test results and the predictions from STAB. The benchmark results of both codes against the Ringhals stability test are found to be at the same level of accuracy. The biases for the predicted global decay ratio are [approximately]0.07 in TRACE results and -0.04 in STAB results. However, the standard deviations of their decay ratios are both large, [approximately]0.1, indicating large uncertainties in both analyses. The uncertainties in both modeling approaches are identified. Although the TRACE code uses more sophisticated neutronics and thermal-hydraulics models, the modeling uncertainty is not less than that of the STAB code.