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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.
Adam Davis, Donald J. Dudziak
Nuclear Technology | Volume 180 | Number 1 | October 2012 | Pages 139-148
Technical Note | Materials for Nuclear Systems | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A14525
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Oil and natural gas companies use 241Am sources for well-logging applications (in the form of americium-beryllium neutron sources). Currently, the domestic supply of 241Am is depleted, and industry is now purchasing sources from Russia. The goal of the Americium Recovery Project (ARP) is to reprocess defense-waste plutonium to recover 241Am that would then be sold to oil and gas companies, providing a safe, secure domestic source for industrial applications. Because the primary radiological concern with an 241Am source is external photon exposure, the radiological workers involved in the ARP will perform operations in glove boxes featuring lead-lined gloves. Given the U.S. mandate for the reduction of lead in industrial settings and the costs associated with the disposal of leaded gloves as mixed waste, alternatives are being considered to the traditional lead-lined gloves used in glove boxes. Several composite materials were previously developed and analyzed for incident photons of energies below 400 keV using the Lambert-Beer law to calculate transmission fractions. This research extends the energy range to 10 MeV and uses a source term of interest to the ARP. Further, the Monte Carlo transport code MCNP5 is used to calculate source-normalized doses using two common response functions: H'(0.07) and H*(10). The results and calculations presented in this research are more detailed than previous calculations and present further rationale for the context-specific selection of a given material.