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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.
Gwang Seop Son, Dong Hoon Kim, Choul Woong Son, Joon Kyo Kim, Jae Hyun Park
Nuclear Technology | Volume 184 | Number 3 | December 2013 | Pages 297-309
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A24987
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents the architecture of the Safety Programmable Logic Controller (SPLC) for advanced nuclear safety systems and describes the evaluation and analyses of reliability for the SPLC using the Markov model. The SPLC is designed to have structural flexibility for users to select module redundancy according to the requirements of specific applications. To be used for the nuclear safety system, the SPLC is configured for multiple modular redundancy composed of dual modular redundancy and triple modular redundancy. Markov models were developed for three types of existing safety-grade Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) architectures and the SPLC, and the reliabilities of the architectures were then evaluated and analyzed using the models. The results show that the reliability of SPLC is up to 1.6 times better than those of the three PLC architectures, and the mean time to failure (MTTF) of the SPLC is up to 22 000 h better than those of the three. From the reliability analyses, the failure rate of each module in the SPLC should be <2 × 10-4 /h, and the MTTF average increase rate depending on the fault coverage factor (FCF) increment, i.e., MTFF/FCF, is 4 months/0.1.
