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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.
Michel Bloch, Daniel Dussarté, Jean-Louis Pierrey
Nuclear Technology | Volume 84 | Number 3 | March 1989 | Pages 282-284
Technical Paper | Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Risk Management / Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT89-A34211
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Premature aging of the heat exchange tubes in steam generators due to stress corrosion may be a common cause of nonsimultaneous multiple ruptures, enhancing the risk associated with that accidental situation. Classical methods for probabilistic evaluation are not easily applicable to this type of problem. The component lifetime can be used directly as a primary random variable with a distribution width (mean value irrelevant) deduced from operational data or engineering judgment. The conditional probability to get one or more ruptures before a critical time following the occurrence of the first rupture can be obtained from the probability laws for the time intervals between the first and successive ruptures and can be used in accident sequence analyses. As an example, the conditional probability of the second rupture is approximately proportional to the critical time and is ∼10−4 for a lifetime distribution standard deviation of 15 000 h and a critical time of 1 h.