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Radiation Protection & Shielding
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.
Meeting Spotlight
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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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.
Marcel Straetz, Rainer Mertz, Jöerg Starflinger (Univ of Stuttgart)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 815-824
In the frame of the EU-funded sCO2-HeRo (supercritical carbon dioxide heat removal) project a heat removal system, based upon a Brayton cycle using supercritical CO2 as working fluid, is currently under investigation. The system should be able to work as a self-launching, self-propelling and self-sustaining decay heat removal system to be retrofitted to existing light water reactors. In case of an accident in a nuclear power plant with the combined initiating events of a station blackout and the loss of the ultimate heat sink this additional heat removal system will transfer the decay heat from the reactor core to the diverse ultimate heat sink, e.g. the ambient air. The system consists of a turbine, compressor, generator, compact heat exchanger and a gas cooler. Since the turbine of the turbo-compressor-system (TCS) provides more power than it is needed for the compressor, the system is self-sustaining and the excess electricity of the generator can be used for auxiliary devices of the power plant. To demonstrate the feasibility of this system, a small-scale demonstrator unit will be attached to the PWR glass model at Gesellschaft für Simulatorschulung (GfS), Essen, Germany. The components of the system will be designed, manufactured and experimental investigated within the sCO2-HeRo project. To determine the design of the compact heat exchanger for the glass model application, which is the objective of the Institute of Nuclear Technology and Energy Systems (IKE), experimental investigations on heat transfer between condensing steam and sCO? were performed in the SCARLETT laboratory. Based upon these experimental results, the compact heat exchanger was designed, manufactured, tested and delivered to GfS.