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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.
Sang Won Lee, Han Gon Kim, Seung Jong Oh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 158 | Number 3 | June 2007 | Pages 396-407
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3850
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
APR1400 is an evolutionary pressurized water reactor developed in Korea. The emergency core cooling system (ECCS) of APR1400 has been improved by adopting an independent four-train safety injection system. Each train is composed of a safety injection pump and an accumulator with a fluidic device, the passive flow rate controlling equipment. Also, ECCS water is injected directly into the reactor vessel upper downcomer, ~2 m above the cold-leg centerline. With these design characteristics, more complex thermal-hydraulic phenomena can be observed in a large-break loss-of-coolant accident (LBLOCA) scenario. In this paper, the effects of these design characteristics on the LBLOCA scenario are examined using the RELAP5/MOD3.3 code. The code modeling capability in predicting the phenomena important to APR1400 ECCS design is examined using available experiments. It shows that RELAP5/MOD3.3 conservatively predicts the bypass rate and downcomer boiling phenomena. RELAP5/MOD3.3 code analysis of APR1400 LBLOCA with conservative assumptions show that ECCS design is adequate and there is no degradation of core cooling capability and reheat phenomena during the late reflood phase. All fuel rods are quenched in the early reflood phase when the fluidic devices are inactive, showing the effectiveness of the direct vessel injection and fluidic devices against an APR1400 LBLOCA scenario.