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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.
Abdellatif M. Yacout, Stefano Salvatores, Yuri Orechwa
Nuclear Technology | Volume 113 | Number 2 | February 1996 | Pages 177-189
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35187
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Failure times of components are traditionally used to evaluate their reliability. An alternate approach is to analyze the degradation data accumulated during the component’s testing or during its normal operation. Degradation analysis is particularly useful when it is not possible to observe a significant number of failures. This is the case for metallic Integral Fast Reactor fuel pins irradiated in Experimental Breeder Reactor II, where failures have not taken place under normal operating conditions. A degradation analysis methodology is presented and applied to these pins. The time-to-failure distribution for the fuel pins is estimated based on a fixed threshold failure model. The confidence intervals of the distribution are calculated using a parametric bootstrap method.