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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.
Alexandra Pudewills, Nina Müller-Hoeppe, Reiner Papp
Nuclear Technology | Volume 112 | Number 1 | October 1995 | Pages 79-88
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A15853
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the last few years, several repository concepts have been developed for salt formations to dispose of both high-level radioactive waste from reprocessing and spent-fuel elements. The results of a series of thermal and near-field thermomechanical analyses for disposal in drifts at three horizons of a repository are described. The rise of the temperature in the emplacement area and the surrounding rock, the room closure of access and emplacement drifts during operational time, followed by the long-term compaction of the backfill material and the resulting stresses in rock salt, are investigated. Two numerical modeling procedures were used to obtain the results in this study. A computer code based on the closed-form solution for a heat source in a homogeneous medium was applied to predict the temperatures; a finite-element code, taking into account the nonlinear, temperature- and time-dependent behavior of rock salt and backfill material, was used to investigate the thermomechanical effects.