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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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.
Ethan S. Chaleff, Nikolas Antolin, Wolfgang Windl, Thomas Blue
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 1 | October 2018 | Pages 59-65
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1464288
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Molten salts have been proposed as coolants for numerous advanced reactor designs. It is envisioned that these reactors, both fluoride-salt–cooled high-temperature reactors and molten-salt–fueled reactors will operate at high temperatures, where the radiative heat transfer properties of the salts may be required for accurate heat transfer analysis. Experimental challenges have prevented the measurement of absorption coefficients in most salts. In an attempt to fill this gap in data, the Vienna Ab-Initio Simulation Package is used in the present research to calculate the absorption coefficient resulting from photoelectric interactions in numerous molten salts. Ab-initio molecular dynamics is used to generate the amorphous structures of a variety of salts. The pure halide salts LiF, FLiNaK, and FLiBe, are shown to be optically clear through a wide portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Conversely, the transition metal fluoride salt KF-ZrF4 is shown to be substantially opaque. As chromium is a known impurity of concern from the corrosion of steels in reactor environments, the effect on absorption of low levels of chromium in an otherwise transparent salt is investigated and found to significantly increase absorption at relevant wavelengths.