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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.
Tracy R. Wenz, Robert D. Busch
Nuclear Technology | Volume 105 | Number 1 | January 1994 | Pages 31-36
Technical Note | Special on Nuclear Criticality Safety / Nuclear Criticality Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A34908
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The central reactivity worth measurements performed in Lady Godiva were duplicated using TWODANT, a deterministic neutron transport code, and the 16-group Hansen-Roach cross-section library. The purpose of this work was to determine how well the Hansen-Roach library predicts the reactivity worths for a fast neutron system. Lady Godiva is a spherical uranium metal (93.7 wt% 235U) critical assembly with a neutron flux distribution dominant in the first five groups of the Hansen-Roach energy structure (0.1 MeV and up). Provided that the cross sections of the replacement material do not undergo large variations (less than an order of magnitude) in any of the aforementioned groups, the calculated reactivities were within 10% of the experimental values. For cases where the reactivities were outside this range, a large variation in the cross section was found to exist in one of the groups, which was not fully accounted for in the Hansen-Roach group structure. However, even in the cases where the agreement between calculation and experiment was not good, the calculated reactivity appeared to be an extremum in that the effect was found to be either more negative or more positive than the experimental value.
