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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.
Hakim Ferroukhi, Paul Coddington
Nuclear Technology | Volume 142 | Number 1 | April 2003 | Pages 19-34
Technical Paper | RETRAN | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3371
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A code environment based on the CORETRAN and RETRAN-3D codes for the three-dimensional (3-D) kinetic analysis of transients in Swiss light water reactors is currently being developed and implemented within the STARS project at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). As a first step in the application of these codes, an assessment of both codes for the analysis of reactivity-initiated transients in pressurized water reactors (PWRs) was performed. For that purpose, the Nuclear Energy Agency benchmark exercises, consisting of rod ejection and uncontrolled rod bank withdrawal transients, were selected. These analyses showed that very satisfactory results could be obtained with both CORETRAN and RETRAN-3D. In this paper, a summary of the PWR results, along with an emphasis of important modeling options that were identified during that work, is presented. As a second step, it was considered important to assess both codes for boiling water reactor (BWR) reactivity transients. Therefore, in addition, the analysis of a hypothetical beyond-design-basis rod drop accident for a Swiss BWR core at end of cycle is presented in this paper. This transient, which was previously analyzed with another 3-D code at PSI, shows that also for BWRs, both codes give satisfactory results.
