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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.
John R. White, Thomas F. DeLorey
Nuclear Technology | Volume 95 | Number 2 | August 1991 | Pages 129-147
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT91-A34551
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A detailed sensitivity and uncertainty analysis is performed for several parameters of interest in the design of the high-conversion reactor (HCR) concept. The main goals of this work are to determine the response standard deviation due to basic nuclear data uncertainties and to incorporate integral experiment information from the PROTEUS facility to reduce the computed uncertainties, where possible. The results for reactivity and five important reaction rate ratios (at the 0% void state) that are part of the measurement program in the PROTEUS phase II experiments are highlighted. In addition, the void coefficient at both low void and high void is studied. The computed correlation coefficients between the PROTEUS and HCR models are uniformly high for all responses. This indicates that a reduction in uncertainty can be achieved within the measurement uncertainty and that the PROTEUS experiments were ideal for the physics characterization of HCR responses.