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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.
Eric Dumonteil
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 3 | December 2009 | Pages 793-798
MC Calculations | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (PART 3) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9308
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Various variance-reduction techniques are used in Monte Carlo particle transport. Most of them rely either on a hypothesis made by the user (parameters of the exponential biasing, mesh and weight bounds for weight windows, etc.) or on a previous calculation of the system with, for example, a deterministic solver. This paper deals with a new acceleration technique, namely, autoadaptative neural network biasing. Indeed, instead of using any a priori knowledge of the system, it is possible, at a given point in a simulation, to use the Monte Carlo histories previously simulated to train a neural network, which, in return, should be able to provide an estimation of the adjoint flux, used then for biasing the simulation. We will describe this method, detail its implementation in the Monte Carlo code Tripoli4, and discuss its results on two test cases.