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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.
Avneet Sood, R. Arthur Forster, B. J. Archer, R. C. Little
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 1 | December 2021 | Pages S100-S133
Critical Review | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1956255
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The history and advances of neutronics calculations at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project through the present are reviewed. Substantial improvements to neutron diffusion methods and the invention of both the Monte Carlo neutron transport methods in 1947 and deterministic discrete ordinates Sn in 1953 were all made at Los Alamos just after the Manhattan Project. We briefly summarize early simpler and more approximate neutronics methods and then describe the need to better predict neutronics behavior through consideration of theoretical equations, models and algorithms, experimental measurements, and available computing capabilities and their limitations. This paper briefly covers key advances in deterministic methods during the Manhattan Project. These capabilities, coupled with increasing postwar defense needs and the invention of electronic computing with the Electronic Numeric Integrator and Computer, known as ENIAC, and the Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer Model, known as MANIAC, led to the creation of Monte Carlo and deterministic discrete ordinates neutronics transport methods. We note the important role that the scientific comradery between the Los Alamos scientists played in the process. This paper briefly covers the early methods, algorithms, computers, and electronic and women pioneers that enabled Monte Carlo to spread to all areas of science. We focus heavily on these early developments and the subsequent creation of the MCNP® code, advances in its associated nuclear data, and its applications to problems of national defense at Los Alamos.