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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.
R. J. Park, S. B. Kim, K. Y. Suh, J. L. Rempe, F. B. Cheung
Nuclear Technology | Volume 156 | Number 3 | December 2006 | Pages 270-281
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3790
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Detailed analyses of a late-phase melt progression in the advanced power reactor (APR)1400 were completed to identify the melt and the thermal-hydraulic states of the in-vessel materials in the reactor vessel lower plenum at the time of reactor vessel failure to evaluate the candidate strategies for an in-vessel corium retention (IVR). Initiating events considered included high-pressure transients of a total loss of feed water (LOFW) and a station blackout (SBO) and low-pressure transients of a 0.0009-m2 small, 0.0093-m2 medium, and 0.0465-m2 large-break loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) without safety injection. Best-estimate simulations for these low-probability events with conservative accident progression assumptions that lead to reactor vessel failure were performed by using the SCDAP/RELAP5/MOD3.3 computer code. The SCDAP/RELAP5/MOD3.3 results have shown that the pressurizer surge line failed before the reactor vessel failure, which results in a rapid decrease of the in-vessel pressure and a delay of the reactor vessel failure time of ~40 min in the high-pressure sequences of the total LOFW and the SBO transients. In all the sequences, ~80 to 90% of the core material was melted and relocated to the lower plenum of the reactor vessel at the time of reactor vessel failure. The maximum value of the volumetric heat source in the corium pool was estimated as 1.9 to 3.7 MW/m3. The corium temperature was ~2800 to 3400 K at the time of reactor vessel failure. The highest volumetric heat source sequence is predicted for the 0.0465-m2 large-break LOCA without safety injection in the APR1400, because this sequence leads to an early reactor vessel failure.