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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.
Sukho Lee, In-Goo Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 130 | Number 1 | April 2000 | Pages 18-26
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT00-A3074
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The critical reactor header break and the thermosiphoning experiments in the RD-14 test facility were simulated with the RELAP5/MOD3.1 code. The RELAP5 code has been developed for best-estimate transient simulation of pressurized water reactors and associated systems, but it has not been assessed for a Canada deuterium uranium (CANDU) reactor. Therefore, this study has been initiated with an aim to identify the code applicability in a CANDU reactor by simulating some of the tests performed in the RD-14 facility. The RD-14 test facility at Whiteshell Nuclear Research Establishment is a full-scale pressurized-water loop. The RD-14 is not a scale model of any particular CANDU reactor. Rather, it possesses many geometric features of a CANDU reactor heat transport system and is capable of operating at conditions similar to those expected to occur in a reactor under normal operation and some postulated accident conditions. In this study, two critical reactor header break tests (B8711 and B8713) and three thermosiphoning tests (T8513, T8515, and T8517) were analyzed with the RELAP5 code. The results were compared with experimental data and those of CATHENA performed by Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. The RELAP5 analyses demonstrate the code's capability to predict reasonably the main phenomena occurring in the transient, in both the qualitative and the quantitative view. However, some discrepancies after the emergency coolant injection for the critical break case and also related to the behaviors of the mass flow rate and the primary pressure for the thermosiphoning case were observed.
