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ANS Student Conference 2025
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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.
Toshihide Takai, Tomohiro Furukawa, Hidemasa Yamano
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 9 | September 2019 | Pages 1164-1174
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1607136
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes evaluation results of thermophysical properties of stainless steel (SS) containing 5 mass % boron carbide (B4C) in its solid phase. First, the authors synthesized SS-B4C samples with emphasis on 5 mass % B4C and SS using a hot press method and then evaluated its homogeneity in several ways, such as chemical composition analysis, metallographic structure observation, and micro X-ray diffraction. This study also evaluated the density and the specific heat and thermal conductivity of the SS-B4C sample and found that the density becomes lower and the temperature dependence of the density decreased as the temperature rose compared to that of stainless steel Type 316L (SS316L) used as a reactor material. The specific heat became slightly higher than that of SS316L and showed similar temperature dependence up to 1073 K. Unexpectedly, the thermal conductivity became lower than that of SS316L and showed similar temperature dependence up to 1273 K.
