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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.
Min Ho Lee (UNIST), Dong-Wook Jerng (Chung-Ang Univ), In Cheol Bang (UNIST)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 20-25
Reactor vessel auxiliary cooling system (RVACS) has been developed to make diverse safety system for sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR). In the loss of flow (LOF) accident condition, decay heat from the core is transferred to the reactor vessel by natural circulation inside of the sodium pool. The reactor vessel transfers its heat to the containment vessel by the conduction and radiation through the gap between the reactor vessel and the containment. Finally, the containment vessel releases its heat to the air flow from the atmosphere, which is the ultimate heat sink, by means of the RVACS. Although natural circulation of sodium is an important phenomenon because it determines the sodium boiling, it has not been sufficiently researched for the case of the RVACS. Therefore, in this study, natural circulation of the sodium in the LOF condition was analyzed experimentally to evaluate the maximum sodium temperature in the LOF. Water was used as a simulant for the sodium with the reduced scale. The experimental apparatus was scaled down about 1/25 by length, focusing on the modified Boussinesq number which represents the ratio of heat transfer by the natural circulation to the conduction. Because the modified Boussinesq number was the same with that of the actual reactor, overall temperature distribution in scale-downed apparatus with water would be similar to that of the sodium pool. Difference between the maximum and the minimum temperature of the water pool in the experiment was about 0.7oC, which corresponds to 5.1oC temperature difference of the sodium in LOF condition of an actual reactor with the operation of the RVACS. By comparing temperature difference