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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.
Jinkyun Park, Wondea Jung, Jaewhan Kim, Jaejoo Ha
Nuclear Technology | Volume 143 | Number 3 | September 2003 | Pages 290-308
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3418
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In complex systems, such as nuclear power plants (NPPs) or airplane control systems, human error has been regarded as the primary cause of many events. Therefore, to ensure system safety, extensive effort has been made to identify the significant factors that can cause human error. According to related studies, written manuals or operating procedures are revealed as one of the important factors, and the understandability is pointed out as one of the major reasons for procedure-related human errors.Many qualitative checklists have been suggested to evaluate emergency operating procedures (EOPs) of NPPs so as to minimize procedure-related human errors. However, since qualitative evaluations using checklists have some drawbacks, a quantitative measure that can quantify the complexity of EOPs is indispensable.From this necessity, Park et al. suggested the step complexity (SC) measure to quantify the complexity of procedural steps included in EOPs. To verify the appropriateness of the SC measure, averaged step performance time data obtained from emergency training records of the loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) and the excess steam demand event were compared with estimated SC scores. However, although averaged step performance time data and estimated SC scores show meaningful correlation, some important issues such as determining proper weighting factors have to be clarified to ensure the appropriateness of the SC measure. These were not properly dealt with due to a lack of backup data.In this paper, to resolve one of the important issues, emergency training records are additionally collected and analyzed in order to determine proper weighting factors. The total number of collected records is 66, and the training scenarios cover five emergency conditions including the LOCA, the steam generator tube rupture, the loss of all feedwater, the loss of off-site power, and the station blackout. From these records, average step performance time data are retrieved, and new weighting factors are determined by using a nonlinear regression analysis. The results show that the SC scores quantified by the new weighting factors show statistically meaningful correlation with averaged step performance time data. Thus, it can be concluded that the SC measure can represent the complexity of procedural steps included in EOPs.