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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.
Shinsuke Tashiro, Takuya Ohno, Yuki Amano, Ryoichiro Yoshida, Koji Watanabe, Hithoshi Abe
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 10 | October 2022 | Pages 1553-1561
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2045179
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To contribute to the confinement safety evaluation of radioactive materials in a glove box (GB) fire accident, combustion tests with polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) and polycarbonate (PC) as typical panel materials for the GB have been conducted with a relatively large-scale apparatus. As important data for evaluating confinement safety, the release ratio and the particle size distribution of soot generated from burned materials as source term data for analyzing the migration behavior of soot particles were obtained. Furthermore, the effect of soot loading on the rise of the different pressure (ΔP) of the high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter ΔP was also investigated. The results showed that the release ratio of the soot generated from the burned PC was about seven times as large as PMMA and the relatively large particles of the soot from PC were also larger than PMMA. In addition, by considering the effect of the loading volume of the soot particles in the relatively low loading region of the soot, it was found that the behavior of the rise of ΔP accompanied with soot loading could be represented uniformly regardless of the kinds of combustion materials.
