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Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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Latest News
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.
Chenglin Zhu, Yuhang Yan, Shuo Li, Hui Yu (SPICRI)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 732-737
The cosLATC is a multi-group two-dimensional lattice code developed by SNPSDC, which is an essential part in the COSINE(Core and System Integrated Engine) code package. Resonance self-shielding calculation is a very important part in the reactor physics calculation. It provides effective cross section for the next transport calculation. Traditional two-region resonance calculation method based on equivalence theory was developed in the cosLATC code. However, for the fuel pin which contains strong resonance self-shielding effect or huge absorption cross section nuclides, the spatial variation of the self-shielding effect is crucial to determine its radial power distribution. The equivalence theory assumes a spatially constant cross section within the fuel region and cannot evaluate spatially dependent resonance self-shielding effect. So the SDDM (Spatially Dependent Dancoff Method) self-shielding resonance was developed in the latest version of cosLATC which can split the fuel pellet into arbitrary number of annuli and generate the effective cross section for every annulus. A serial of benchmarks are calculated to verify this new resonance self-shielding module were performed. These benchmarks include different assembly problems of Watts Bar benchmark and critical benchmarks. The results show that the new resonance self-shielding module is capable of modeling the resonance self-shielding in a variety of PWR benchmarking cases, including difficult fuel lattice cases with poison, control rods or mixed gadolinia fuel rods. The critical calculation results can be accepted for the lattices which the conditions vary with the enrichment, radius of fuel rods, lattices pitch and experimental buckling.