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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.
Sourena Golesorkhi, Blair P. Bromley, Matthew H. Kaye
Nuclear Technology | Volume 194 | Number 2 | May 2016 | Pages 178-191
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-30
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The pressure-tube heavy water reactor (PT-HWR) has excellent potential as an operational technology to exploit the use of thorium. Reactor core configurations of an existing PT-HWR design with thorium-based fuels were simulated using the DRAGON/DONJON reactor physics code suite. The ultimate goal of this work was to achieve a self-sufficient equilibrium thorium cycle with a fissile inventory ratio (FIR) greater than unity (FIR ≥ 1.0) by altering the fueling configuration and leaving the reactor model relatively unchanged from the existing 700-MW(electric)–class PT-HWR design. A further constraint was the license requirements limiting the maximum channel and bundle powers of existing PT-HWRs. To improve the breeding potential in the PT-HWR, heterogeneous seed and blanket core configurations were selected for assessment as opposed to using a homogenous core configuration with one single type of fuel. A number of bundle design concepts were modeled with DRAGON: A 24-element variant of the internally cooled annular fuel bundle was chosen for the seed fuel, and a conventional 28-element bundle was used for the blanket fuel. Two annular heterogeneous core configurations were considered: inner seed outer blanket (ISOB) and inner blanket outer seed (IBOS). Time-average and instantaneous power calculations were performed using DONJON. It was found that while the ISOB configuration could attain net breeding (FIR ≥ 1.0), the maximum channel and bundle powers exceeded the defined limits. When the reactor was derated to reduce these powers, the fuel cycle fell just below net breeding, although it did have a very high FIR. The IBOS configuration could meet the power limits without derating but was not self-sufficient. Despite not being net breeders, the FIR in both cases was very close to unity (0.986 to 0.995). Work is continuing to further optimize the fuel bundle concepts and core configurations and to achieve net breeding. Overall, the PT-HWR shows great promise for the current-generation implementation of the thorium fuel cycle.
