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ANS Student Conference 2025
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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.
Yutaka Takeuchi, Yukio Takigawa, Shiho Miyamoto
Nuclear Technology | Volume 128 | Number 2 | November 1999 | Pages 257-275
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A3030
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A methodology for boiling water reactor (BWR) regional stability with a one-point neutron kinetics model is proposed from the higher harmonics viewpoint and is verified with the Ringhals-1 stability benchmark test data. A one-point neutron kinetics model for regional stability analysis is derived from the spatial neutron diffusion equation using the mode decomposition technique. From the derivation, the intermode coupled reactivity coefficient is defined and applied to a frequency-domain BWR stability analysis model. The analysis model traces a unit power perturbation and calculates the open-loop transfer function as the power response to the input perturbation. Combined with the aforementioned reactivity coefficient and the asymmetric shape perturbation that reflects the first azimuthal mode, the first azimuthal mode is excited exclusively without any assumption on the ex-core model. Therefore, the regional stability can be evaluated with a normal recirculation flow model, which is employed for core-wide stability analysis. The methodology is verified with the Ringhals-1 stability benchmark test data, whose stability conditions were widely distributed and suitable for verification. The results show that the proposed methodology is quite appropriate for BWR regional stability analysis.
