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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.
Xianggao Wang, Kejun Dong, Ming He, Shaoyong Wu, Shan Jiang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 182 | Number 2 | May 2013 | Pages 235-241
Regular Technical Paper | Special Issue on the Symposium on Radiation Effects in Ceramic Oxide and Novel LWR Fuels / Reprocessing | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A16433
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study extracts UF-2 ions from UF4 sample material for the first time so as to improve the measurement accuracy and sensitivity for accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) measurement of 236U. Compared to the commonly used UO-/UO2 (or U3O8) combination, the UF-2/UF4 approach brings a higher beam current of extracted U-containing ions and lower interference from U isotopes (235U in particular). The UF4 prepared with the procedures developed in this work can provide a higher ratio of F- /O- and therefore lower interference from O-containing 235U and 238U molecular ions, compared with that from the UF4 made by conventional liquid-phase reaction. The AMS experiment was carried out on the AMS system at China Institute of Atomic Energy (CIAE), where only a simple surface barrier detector was used to record ions and a reference 236U sample with a 236U/238U ratio of 10-10 was analyzed. The result shows that the measurement sensitivity of the UF-2/UF4 approach is lower than 10-10 and that the reference 236U sample result is in agreement with the reference value within the uncertainty limits, with the relative uncertainty only 4%. In comparison, the measurement sensitivity of the UO- /U3O8 combination approach is 10-9 , and it cannot give a concrete value for the same reference sample using the same AMS system. If the sophisticated 500-ps-resolution time-of-flight detection system is used in combination with the UF-2/UF4 approach, a sensitivity of 10-13 (or lower) is expected.
