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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.
Yun-Je Cho, Hyoung-Kyu Cho, Goon-Cherl Park
Nuclear Technology | Volume 162 | Number 1 | April 2008 | Pages 92-106
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A3935
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Seoul National University (SNU) proposed a new concept of a reactor cavity cooling system (RCCS), which is a critical safety feature in high-temperature gas-cooled reactors. To provide reasonable experimental data for the code assessment and evaluate the feasibility of the proposed system, performance and integrity were tested by separate-effects test apparatuses and a reduced-scale mockup facility named RCCS-SNU. Calculations were performed using the MARS-GCR code for the validation of its capability to simulate multidimensional behavior, natural convective heat transfer, radiative heat transfer, etc. This assessment showed that the MARS-GCR code reasonably predicts the characteristics of the radiative heat transfer in the cavity and the forced convective heat transfer through the air-cooling pipes. However, the study showed deviation in the simulation of heat transfers that occur inside the cavity and water pool, especially the thermal stratification phenomenon. As a result, it was concluded that applying the system code with coarse node, MARS-GCR had certain limitations in the simulation of local phenomena.
