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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.
Jae-Won Lee, Do-Youn Lee, Young-Soon Lee, Jae-Hwan Yang, Geun-Il Park, Jung-Won Lee, Hyoung-Mun Kwon, Yung-Zun Cho
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 1 | October 2018 | Pages 101-109
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1469347
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Performance tests of mechanical decladding technology for estimating the feeding portions of the recovered fuel fragments to an electrolytic reduction process were conducted in terms of the fuel rod burnups of 27.3 to 65.7 GWd/tonne uranium (tU) for the used pressurized water reactor nuclear fuel. The decladding efficiencies with fuel burnups were quantitatively obtained from slitting decladding tests. Based on the average fuel rod burnups, fuel rods with an average burnup of up to 52.3 GWd/tU showed above 99%, but higher burnup fuels of above 54.9 GWd/tU were below 97.52% in the decladding efficiency. It was interpreted that variations in decladding efficiency with fuel burnups were closely linked to the opening characteristics of the gap between the pellets and cladding. However, the fuel fragment size distribution after slitting decladding has little difference in fuel burnup changes between 34.8 and 55.4 GWd/tU. Hence, feeding portions of the fuel fragments from an assembly basis by using the decladding efficiency and recovered fragment size distribution data were estimated with burnup variations of 35 to 52.5 GWd/tU.