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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.
M. Scott McKinley, Alexis E. Schach von Wittenau
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 1 | October 2009 | Pages 245-248
Radiography | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (Part 1) / Radioisotopes | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9134
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
MERCURY is a modern, parallel, general-purpose Monte Carlo code being developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Recently, a radiographic capability has been added. MERCURY can create a source of diagnostic, virtual particles that are aimed at pixels in an image tally. This new feature is compared to the radiography code HADES for verification and timing. Comparisons for accuracy were made using the French Test Object and for timing were made by tracking through an unstructured mesh. In addition, self-consistency tests were run in MERCURY for the British Test Object and scattering test problem. MERCURY and HADES were found to agree to the precision of the input data. HADES appears to run around eight times faster than MERCURY in the timing study. Profiling the MERCURY code has turned up several differences in the algorithms that account for this. These differences will be addressed in a future release of MERCURY.
