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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.
Mohamed Tahar Sissaoui, Guy Marleau, Daniel Rozon
Nuclear Technology | Volume 125 | Number 2 | February 1999 | Pages 197-212
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A2942
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new model has been developed to evaluate the variation of few-group cross sections with local parameters and the history of the reactor. This model allows us to generate a coherent set of nuclear cross sections for a CANDU cell. The history dependence of the nuclide concentrations is taken into account by creating a pseudo-isotope, which includes actinides whose concentrations are strongly affected by local parameter history. Simple physical considerations lead us to determine the law of variation of the cross sections as a function of these parameters. They permit the computation of the cross sections for each state of the reactor core, using a unique library for each type of cell, which contains the nuclear cross sections computed at nominal conditions and feedback coefficients. To validate the feedback model, several operational situations were tested, and the results are compared to those given by a transport calculation using the DRAGON cell code.