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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.
Kun-Su Lim, Chang-Lak Kim, Sanghwa Shin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 9 | September 2022 | Pages 1406-1415
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2031496
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Determining whether to release a site after decommissioning a nuclear facility should be preceded by an environmental impact assessment of the exposure radiation dose according to the radionuclides in the soil. Currently, in Korea, various evaluation methodologies and decommissioning technologies are being studied for the first decommissioning of nuclear power plants, starting with Kori Nuclear Power Plant Unit (Kori-1), which is based on the “Multi-Agency Radiation Survey and Site Investigation Manual MARSSIM” developed in the United States. The scope and evaluation targets of deep soil may differ depending on the purpose, but it has been confirmed that the International Atomic Energy Agency and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission are targeting subsurface soil. MARSSIM outlines the need for an evaluation of this subsurface soil but does not suggest specific methods. In NUREG-1757, which complements MARSSIM, it is confirmed that subsurface soil specifically means a soil layer that is 15 to 30 cm deep in the surface layer. In the current study, using the previously verified computational code RESidual RADioactivity (RESRAD)-ONSITE, a methodology for summation is proposed to evaluate the impact of subsurface soil more flexibly and realistically while minimizing the exposure dose evaluation procedure. When using RESRAD-ONSITE according to this evaluation methodology, it was confirmed that it is possible to respond to changes in the depths of various soil layers. In addition, it was also confirmed that this methodology is adaptable to the contamination of nuclides, such as 60Co, 137Cs, 152Eu, and 154Eu, which are expected to be major nuclides when decommissioning nuclear facilities.