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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.
Hyung-Seok Lee, Won Sik Yang, Man Gyun Na, Hangbok Choi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 130 | Number 1 | April 2000 | Pages 1-8
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT00-A3072
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A reconstruction method has been developed for recovering pin powers from Canada deuterium uranium (CANDU) reactor core calculations performed with a coarse-mesh finite difference diffusion approximation and single-assembly lattice calculations. The homogeneous intranodal distributions of group fluxes are efficiently computed using polynomial shapes constrained to satisfy the nodal information approximated from the node-average fluxes. The group fluxes of individual fuel pins in a heterogeneous fuel bundle are determined using these homogeneous intranodal flux distributions and the form functions obtained from the single-assembly lattice calculations. The pin powers are obtained using these pin fluxes and the pin power cross sections generated by the single-assembly lattice calculation. The accuracy of the reconstruction schemes has been estimated by performing benchmark calculations for partial core representation of a natural uranium CANDU reactor. The results indicate that the reconstruction schemes are quite accurate, yielding maximum pin power errors of less than ~3%. The main contribution to the reconstruction error is made by the errors in the node-average fluxes obtained from the coarse-mesh finite difference diffusion calculation; the errors due to the reconstruction schemes are <1%.