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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.
Chien-Hsiung Lee, I-Ming Huang, Chin-Jang Chang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 135 | Number 2 | August 2001 | Pages 109-122
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT01-A3209
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The thermal-hydraulic behavior of a postulated 1% cold-leg break loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) in a pressurized water reactor system was investigated experimentally by the three-loop Institute of Nuclear Energy Research (INER) Integral System Test (IIST) facility with the passive core cooling system (PCCS) and numerically by the RELAP5/MOD3.2 computer code. The PCCS of the IIST facility includes three core makeup tanks (CMTs), three accumulators, and a four-stage automatic depressurization system. The aim of this research is to study the performance of the CMTs with the actuation of the ADS during a small-break LOCA. The experimental results show that the IIST PCCS has the capability to maintain long-term cooling under a postulated 1% cold-leg break LOCA. The comparison of the RELAP5/MOD3.2 simulation against the experimental data shows good agreement in major thermal-hydraulic phenomena in the reactor coolant system, but the prediction of the asymmetric behavior for the three CMTs during a gravity drain period is inadequate.
