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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.
Nathan Siu, Ali Mosleh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 84 | Number 3 | March 1989 | Pages 265-281
Technical Paper | Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Risk Management / Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT89-A34210
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Uncertainties in the estimation of parameters for common-cause failure models arise not only because of the small number of common-cause failure events but also because recorded events may not be relevant to the analysis of a particular plant. The data base for a plant-specific analysis may therefore be uncertain. A Bayesian methodology for treating data base uncertainties in the estimation of common-cause failure model parameters is developed and applied to a three-pump auxiliary feedwater system. Sensitivity analyses show that the results are not strongly sensitive to assumptions concerning prior distribution type and shape, but do depend somewhat on the degree of state-of-knowledge dependence between uncertain events. These analyses also show that ignoring the uncertainties in the data can lead to significant estimation errors. Finally, an approximate methodology for treating uncertain data is examined; this method provides reasonable estimates of the mean values of the common-cause failure model parameters, but underpredicts the uncertainty in these parameters.