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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.
Mafizur Rahman, Hideki Takano
Nuclear Technology | Volume 133 | Number 3 | March 2001 | Pages 346-354
Technical Note | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT01-A3179
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new 69-group library of multigroup constants for the lattice code WIMS-D/4 has been generated with an improved resonance treatment, processing nuclear data from JENDL-3.2 by NJOY91.108. A parallel ENDF/B-VI based library has also been constructed for intercomparison of results. Benchmark calculations for a number of thermal reactor critical assemblies of both uranium and plutonium fuels have been performed with the code WIMS-D/4.1 with its three different libraries: the original WIMS library (NEA-0329/10) and the new ENDF/B-VI and JENDL-3.2 based libraries. The results calculated with both ENDF and JENDL based libraries show a similar tendency and are found in better agreement with the experimental values. Benchmark parameters are further calculated with the comprehensive lattice code SRAC95. The results from SRAC95 and WIMS-D/4.1 (both using JENDL-3.2 based libraries) agree well with each other. The new library is also verified for its applicability to mixed-oxide cores of varying plutonium contents.
