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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.
Garry C. Gose, Thomas J. Downar, Karl O. Ott
Nuclear Technology | Volume 124 | Number 3 | December 1998 | Pages 284-290
Technical Note | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT98-A2927
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The main-steam-line-break (MSLB) transient in a pressurized water reactor (PWR) is a core overcooling event that can result in a large positive reactivity insertion. In most analyses the shutdown margin is sufficiently large that the core does not return to critical. However, some researchers have reported an increase in the core power even though the core does not return to critical. A simplified kinetics model based on the prompt-jump-kinetics approximation is reported in new work, and a single delayed neutron group is used to explain the core power increase during subcriticality. Specifically, it is shown that the multiplication of the initial delayed-neutron source as predicted by the rate of change of the reactivity during the transient is the reason for the increase in power even though the core never returns to criticality after scram. The results are demonstrated using data from a RETRAN-03 model of a hot-zero-power MSLB analysis of the Three Mile Island unit 1 PWR.
