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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.
Zhang Yingzeng, Xiang Qingpei, Hao Fanhua, Guo Xiaofeng, Xiang Yongchun, Chu Chengsheng, Zeng Jun, Luo Fei, Ze Rende
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 1 | October 2018 | Pages 83-93
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1464839
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Compton camera is a promising instrument for nuclear material imaging in arms control scenarios. In planning to build a Compton camera to detect the symmetry of shielded nuclear materials, the energy spectrum of gamma-rays escaping from the Steve Fetter Nuclear Warhead model is obtained using Monte Carlo simulation. Then, a point model is defined for our study. The proposed Compton camera uses a 5-cm × 5-cm × 1-mm double-sided silicon strips detector as the scattering detector and a segmented ϕ5.08 × 5.08-cm NaI(Tl) array as the absorbing detector. How high-energy gamma-rays impact low-energy characteristic gamma-ray imaging is studied. The result shows that high-energy gamma-rays will reduce the imaging accuracy and signal-to-noise ratio. The holistic angle resolution measured can reach 4.15 deg by all characteristic gamma-rays. The symmetry research result shows that the Compton camera can detect the symmetry property of a nuclear warhead with obvious symmetry or asymmetry.