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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.
Nicolas Shugart, Jeffrey King, Jake Jacobson
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 2 | November 2018 | Pages 147-161
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1469350
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
SafeGuards Analysis (SGA) is a toolbox developed to allow engineers and scientists to create detailed simulations of safeguards material control and accountability simulations. SGA accepts material flow data from an external material flow model and can be used with any existing fuel cycle or material control code. This paper examines some new developments to the SGA code that allow the code to consider material losses over long time frames. The first scenario described in this paper examined an enrichment facility consisting of two material balance areas (MBAs). Cumulative sum and basic control chart tests were evaluated for a case involving a loss of material from both MBAs simultaneously and a case in which material is removed from the facility over a timescale of double the one that the tests were calibrated to detect. A second scenario represents an entire fuel cycle consisting of four MBAs and two materials of interest (low-enriched uranium and plutonium). This scenario evaluated the calibrated safeguards system with three blind unidentified stream cases, with the goal of determining the calibrated system’s ability to detect where the material loss occurred in each case. SGA was able to produce the expected results for all of the examples examined in this paper, demonstrating that modules produced using the toolbox are capable of examining larger systems in realistic multi-MBA scenarios.