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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.
Woan Hwang, Ho Chun Suk, Won Mok Jae
Nuclear Technology | Volume 95 | Number 3 | September 1991 | Pages 314-324
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT91-A34580
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A comprehensive fission gas release model is developed by considering the behavior of multiple bubble sizes on the fuel grain boundary in terms of relevant physical parameters. This model takes into account bubble migration and coalescence; critical bubble size, which depends on the thermal gradient on the grain boundary; and the lenticular shape of the bubbles. Booth’s classical diffusion theory is directly adopted in the modeling of intragranular fission gas behavior. To consider the bubble drift due to the thermal gradient, those bubbles that exceed the critical bubble size are assumed to be left on the grain boundary and to migrate along the thermal gradient until they encounter free voidages. Use of this model in the KAFEPA code, which predicts the absolute magnitude and the trend of the gas release depending on power history, gives better agreement with the experimental data than the predictions of the model in the ELESIM code, which considers only a single bubble size at the grain boundary.