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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.
Aly Karameldin, Hassan M. Elsawy Temraz, Nady Attia Ibrahim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 136 | Number 1 | October 2001 | Pages 1-13
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT01-A3224
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The proposed safety feature considered in this study aims to increase the safety margins of nuclear power plants by proposed water tanks located inside or outside the upper zone of the containment to be utilized for (a) residual heat removal of the reactor in case of station blackout or in case of normal reactor shutdown and (b) beyond-design-basis accidents, in which core melt and debris-concrete interaction take place, associated with accumulative containment pressure increase and partial loss of the active systems. The proposed passive containment system can be implemented by a special mechanism, which can allow the pressurization of the water in the tanks and therefore can enable an additional spray system to start in case of increasing the containment pressure over a certain value just below the design pressure. A conservative case study is that of a Westinghouse 3411-MW(thermal) power station, where the proposed passive containment cooling spray system (PCCSS) will start at a pressure of 6 bars and terminate at a pressure of 3 bars. A one-dimensional lumped model is postulated to describe the thermal and hydraulic process behavior inside the containment after a beyond-design-basis accident. The considered parameters are the spray mass flow rate, the initial droplet diameters, fuel-cooling time, and the ultimate containment pressure. The overall heat and mass balance inside the containment are carried out, during both the containment depressurization (by the spraying system) and pressurization (by the residual energies). The results show that the design of the PCCSS is viable and has a capability to maintain the containment below the design pressure passively for the required grace period of 72 h. Design curves of the proposed PCCSS indicate the effect of the spray flow rate and cooling time on the total sprayed volume during the grace period of 72 h. From these curves it can be concluded that for the grace period of 72 h, the required tank volumes are 3800 and 4700 m3, corresponding to fuel-cooling times (time after shutdown) of two weeks and one week, respectively. This large quantity of water serves as an ultimate heat sink available for the residual heat removal in the case of station blackout. The optimal spraying droplet diameter, travel, and mass flow rate are 3 mm, 30 m, and 100 to 125 kg/s, respectively.
