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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.
Evgueny P. Shabalin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 99 | Number 3 | September 1992 | Pages 280-288
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT92-A34712
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Physicists dealing with conventional reactor dynamics recognize two types of instability and reactor behavior beyond the stability region: asymptotic excur sions and nonlinear periodic oscillations. A periodically pulsed reactor (PPR) has another peculiar instability: Under certain conditions, its power tends to oscillate at a frequency just twice less than the reactor pulsation frequency. The PPR dynamics far beyond the stability region are analyzed by using a discrete nonlinear model. A PPR with a negative temperature reactivity effect inevitably shows the chaotic power pulse energy behavior known as “deterministic chaos.” The way by which a reactor goes to chaos is defined by the time de pendence of the feedback and by the kind of dynamics model used. The most usual case is a Feigenbaum transition in which the PPR passes through an infinite cascade of oscillation period doubling before chaotic motion appears. The transition of PPR to random behavior through the Feigenbaum scenario must be considered to be “safe.”