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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.
Yue Guan, Fei Li, Mohammad Modarres
Nuclear Technology | Volume 133 | Number 3 | March 2001 | Pages 290-309
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT01-A3175
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method of integrating traditional thermal-hydraulic (TH) analysis with probabilistic assessment (PA) (called the TH-PA method) has been developed. This method allows for an exhaustive search through a set of individually developed but subsequently linked logic models to screen and identify accident scenarios. The logic models consist of a probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) used for probabilistic screening purpose and an ensemble of integrated behavior logic diagrams (IBLDs). The PRA model represents the functional/logical relationships of the components and accident scenarios, the same way as is modeled in the conventional PRAs. The IBLDs hierarchically represent system interactions/dependencies due to TH phenomena and human actions. This hierarchy also shows causal factors and consequences of plant states, and identifies induced system failures. The TH-PA method relies on two types of scenario screening: probabilistic screening (PA screening) and TH screening. The PA screening eliminates scenarios with low frequencies (e.g., <10-10/reactor-yr). The traditional frequency-based screening method used in the PRAs has been adopted for PA screening. The TH screening eliminates scenarios that do not expect to result in core uncovery. For the TH screening, a simple accident trajectory approach has been devised. A trajectory represents the collapsed liquid volume fraction in the reactor primary system as a function of primary pressure. The trajectories are based on simple mass and energy conservation equations (if the TH-PA method is applied to a system where mechanical energy transfer is important, momentum conservation should also be considered). The roles of each plant system are then identified by indicating whether the system is a "source" or a "sink" for mass and energy at a given time during accident progression. Based on an input set that represents the plant system failures and the stage of the transient, the accident trajectory is developed. The accident trajectory allows for the evaluation of safety significance of scenarios. The trajectory also determines whether the core becomes uncovered, should the input conditions (i.e., conditions described by the input set) remain unchanged.