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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.
Ian H. Dunbar, Jean Fermandjian, Jean Gauvain
Nuclear Technology | Volume 82 | Number 1 | July 1988 | Pages 36-51
Technical Paper | Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT88-A34115
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The behavior of aerosols in a reactor containment vessel following a severe accident could be an important determinant of the accident source term to the environment. Various processes result in the deposition of the aerosol onto surfaces within the containment, from where they are much less likely to be released. Some of these processes are very sensitive to particle size, so it is important to model the aerosol growth processes: agglomeration and condensation. A number of computer codes have been written to model growth and deposition processes. They have been tested against each other in a series of code comparison exercises. These exercises have investigated sensitivities to physical and numerical assumptions and have also proved a useful means of quality control for the codes. Various exercises in which code predictions are compared with experimental results are now under way.