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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.
Thomas Holschuh, Scott Watson, David Chichester
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 10 | October 2019 | Pages 1336-1345
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1599613
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Transient Reactor Test (TREAT) facility, located at Idaho National Laboratory, restarted transient operations in 2018 following an extended shutdown. It is of interest to establish a methodology and capability to obtain an accurate estimate of the total number of fissions produced in a fissionable test item during a transient at TREAT. Uranium wires were irradiated in TREAT as part of a transient prescription test program, and gamma-ray spectrometry was performed on the wires following irradiation using a high-purity germanium detector. Many fission products are useful for estimating the number of fissions produced in a sample using gamma-ray spectrometry; at TREAT with the time periods used for analysis, the isotopes of interest include 95Zr, 95Nb, 103Ru, 140Ba, and 140La. The number of fissions per gram of 235U determined from these measurements establishes an estimate for future experiments to be performed in the core when a similar configuration is used with a similar transient prescription.
