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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.
Joonhong Ahn, Daisuke Kawasaki, Paul L. Chambré
Nuclear Technology | Volume 140 | Number 1 | October 2002 | Pages 94-112
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-A3326
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The relationship among the repository performance, the canister-array configuration, and the radionuclide mass in waste has been investigated by developing a radionuclide-transport model, where multiple waste canisters and their spatial configuration are taken into account.A mathematical analysis and numerical results show that the radionuclide concentration in the groundwater leaving the canister array increases with the number of canisters included in a water stream parallel to the array axis, but not necessarily in a linear manner. The dependency on the number of canisters is determined mainly by canister-array configuration to the water flow and by model assumptions for transport between multiple canisters.Reduction in the initial mass loading in the waste can potentially have significant effects on the repository performance. The way the mass-reduction effects on the repository performance appear is related to the canister-array configuration. Thus, designs for a repository and a partitioning-transmutation system should be done in a coupled manner.
