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ANS Student Conference 2025
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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.
Kazuaki Kitoh, Seiichi Koshizuka, Yoshiaki Oka
Nuclear Technology | Volume 135 | Number 3 | September 2001 | Pages 252-264
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT01-A3220
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In past designs of supercritical water-cooled reactors, the core flow rate has had to be kept high enough to satisfy the minimum deterioration heat flux ratio criterion where the deterioration heat flux is a function of the core flow rate. Refinement of transient criteria related to the fuel rod design is undertaken, and new dominant transient criteria are proposed in which the cladding temperature is <610°C for Type 316 stainless steel and <840°C for Inconel 700 to reduce the balance of the plant and improve the thermal efficiency. The safety analysis for the high-temperature core using these new criteria is carried out. All the analyzed events satisfy the new criteria. A new formula for the heat transfer correlation at supercritical pressure is proposed based on numerical simulation.
