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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.
Jennifer S. Butler, Darvin Kapitz, Robert P. Martin, Farrokh Seifaee, Ramu K. Sundaram
Nuclear Technology | Volume 170 | Number 1 | April 2010 | Pages 244-260
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 2008 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants / Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9462
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
AREVA NP's U.S. EPR is a 4590-MW(thermal) evolutionary pressurized water reactor that incorporates proven technology with an innovative system architecture to provide an unprecedented level of safety. One of the measures of safety is provided by probability risk assessment (PRA). PRA Level 1 concerns the evaluation of core damage frequency based on various initiating events and the success or failure of various plant event mitigation features. Determination of this measure requires mission success criteria, which are used to build the logic that makes up the fault trees and event trees of the Level 1 PRA. Developing mission success criteria for the wide variety of accident sequences modeled in the PRA Level 1 model requires a large number of thermal-hydraulic calculations. AREVA selected the MAAP4 code to perform these calculations because of its fast computation times relative to more sophisticated thermal-hydraulic codes. This is a unique application of the MAAP4 code, which was developed specifically for severe accident and PRA Level 2 analysis. As such, a study was performed to assess MAAP4's thermal-hydraulic response capabilities against AREVA's S-RELAP5 best-estimate integral systems thermal-hydraulic analysis code.
