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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.
Chan-Hyeong Kim, Siyoung Jang, Warren Dan Reece
Nuclear Technology | Volume 145 | Number 1 | January 2004 | Pages 1-10
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT04-A3455
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) code and a set of high-temperature neutron cross-section data were used to develop an accurate three-dimensional computational model of the Texas A&M University Nuclear Science Center Reactor (NSCR) at full power. The geometry of the reactor core was modeled as closely as possible including the details of all the fuel elements and control rods. The most significant approximation was made for entrained fission products because of the lack of knowledge of fission product inventory in the current reactor core. This study used the concept of "average fission product" to model the fission product in the reactor core and determined the concentration of the average fission product by repeating criticality calculations to make the reactor critical for a given critical condition. Finally, the developed model was tested by comparing the calculated results with those of other approaches, i.e., (a) an in-house three-dimensional diffusion code and (b) foil activation measurement. The developed reactor model showed a good agreement with these approaches. The developed model predicted the thermal neutron flux in samples within 11% of difference when compared with the results from the diffusion code and predicted the production of 198Au and 60Co within ~20% of difference when compared with the values measured with foils. The developed model also calculated the neutron energy spectrum very consistently with the other approaches for the entire energy range considered in this study.