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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.
Luca Galbiati, Luigi Mazzocchi, Paolo Vanini
Nuclear Technology | Volume 113 | Number 3 | March 1996 | Pages 338-345
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35213
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The simplified boiling water reactor makes use of an isolation condenser (1C) submerged in a large water pool; following a postulated accident, the pool water boils off, releasing steam to the atmosphere and ensuring passive containment cooling for at least 3 days. A further improvement is the isolation condenser pool cooling system (ICPCS), proposed by ENEL /CISE. It makes use of reflux condensing heat exchangers directly connected to the pool gas space of the IC; noncondens-able gases can be vented during the earlier phase of operation by means of a water seal mechanism operating in a passive way. The expected benefits from the ICPCS are the elimination of constraints on the “grace period” duration and the possibility of avoiding an extended release of a visible and potentially radioactive steam plume. To verify the performance both at component and system level, an instrumented ICPCS prototype, operating with a thermal power scaling factor of ∼1:615, has been built and tested at CISE laboratories, both in steady and dynamic conditions. The experimental results confirm the capability of the tested ICPCS module to operate in a safe and passive way.