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The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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.
Mofassir Ud Dowla, M. A. Rashid Sarkar (Bangladesh Univ of Eng and Technology)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 523-532
This paper illustrates numerical simulations of heat transfer and fluid flow in triangular section and unit cell section of fuel blocks of High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (HTGR). The thermal hydraulic simulations have been performed in a minimalistic computational resource environment and their viabilities have been studied. General Atomics Modular High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (MHTGR) has been considered in this work as a reference design. In this paper, 3-D models of triangular section and unit cell section of fuel blocks similar to the MHTGR design have been developed for single phase helium flow using COMSOL Multiphysics software. In these models, velocity profiles, temperature profiles, pressure profiles, Reynolds number profiles and Nusselt number profiles have been studied. Algebraic y+ turbulence model has been used in this work. Finally, the simulation results have been compared with General Atomics provided MHTGR design parameters and theoretically obtained results to check for their accuracy and viability.
