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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.
Kotaro Nakada, Kazumi Miyagi, Norihiko Handa, Sadao Hattori
Nuclear Technology | Volume 82 | Number 2 | August 1988 | Pages 132-146
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT88-A34102
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Taking the decay heat removal system of a liquid-metal fast breeder reactor (LMFBR) as an example, a new reliability analysis method has been developed that can estimate how a failure occurring in a subsystem of a redundant system proliferates to another subsystem and how the independence of the redundant system is gradually lost. The Monte Carlo method is employed in the state transition representation. Environment changes evaluated from physical parameters, which correspond to failure time and to time- and sequence-dependent failure rates, are used to evaluate the stress-strength model. The failure rates derived are used to identify subsequent sequences. As a result of applying this technique to the decay heat removal operation of an LMFBR, a more realistic value of the unreliability has been obtained in a reasonable computation time, and the validity of this technique has been confirmed. The investigation of the interaction between the system and the pipe in the decay heat removal system has revealed that the influence is small under conditions set for this study.
