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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.
Jiyoung Lee, Haseeb ur Rehman, Yonghee Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 201 | Number 1 | January 2018 | Pages 41-51
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1392397
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper evaluates the effectiveness of producing 99Mo using the photonuclear giant dipole resonance (GDR) (γ, n) reaction. The focus of the study is a novel implementation of the photonuclear transmutation method by the use of laser-Compton scattering (LCS) gamma-ray beams to produce 99Mo. The use of LCS enables the production of energetic and high-intensity gamma rays with a tunable energy spectrum based on various facility parameters (i.e., electron energy, laser energy, and collimation angle). The combination of these three features have made the use of the LCS process for the production of 99Mo using the photonuclear (γ, n) reaction a concept deserving further investigation. In this study, rigorous optimization of the LCS spectrum is performed to maximize the overlapping of the GDR cross section and the LCS spectrum to optimize the production rate and activity of the 99Mo product. Furthermore, the unique innovation of the multiple laser extraction concept is also included in this paper in order to increase the gamma-ray intensity by a factor of 10 to 20.
