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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.
Niranjan Gudibande, Kannan Iyer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 196 | Number 3 | December 2016 | Pages 674-683
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT16-40
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Radioactive materials are transported in hollow steel casks filled with lead. The lead in these casks can melt in an accidental fire during transportation leading to an increase in its volume. This plastically deforms the steel shell housing the lead. When the cask subsequently cools after the fire is extinguished, voids will form in the solidified lead. This work deals with the simulation of solidification with void formation in these transportation casks. In these simulations, one has to deal with solid-liquid and void-material interfaces. Solid-liquid movement during solidification is treated using a modified enthalpy method. The void that is formed in the solidified lead is assumed to be a vacuum. Consistent with this assumption, the boundary conditions of zero pressure and zero stress are imposed on the interface. The growth of the void is handled using the volume of fluid method. The methodology is first benchmarked by comparing the simulations with some experimental results available in the literature. Simulations are then performed for solidification in the transportation cask to study the effect of orientation on the void formation. A methodology is then developed to quantify the overall shielding effectiveness of the cask in terms of the total amount of radiation leaked.