It was a year of renewal and milestones at the Idaho National Laboratory, which celebrated 2014 with a video that runs through its many fields of research, including ongoing testing labs and major initiatives to develop fuel systems that make greater use of the power within the fission process.
Renewal starts with the laboratory extending a 10-year laboratory management contract with Battelle Energy Alliance for an additional five years. Laboratory Director John Grossenbacher gave BEA credit for increasing the capabilities of the lab, improving infrastructure and maintaining a top-notch staff of experts in their fields.
Early in the year – in February, 2014 – the Department of Energy issued a finding of no significant impact for the environmental assessment on the resumption of transient testing at the Idaho facility, a significant step in the use of the lab's nuclear test reactor that has helped advance nuclear technology since the 1950s.
The Idaho test reactor began operating in 1959 and was put on standby in 1994 after a 35-year run in which it was used in more than 2,800 transient tests on thermal and fast reactor fuels.
As if right on cue, the lab received what it called a “long-awaited delivery” in the summer, a cask containing four experimental irradiated pins of nuclear fuel, which had been sent to the the Phenix prototype fast breeder reactor in France in 2006.
The lab's FUTURIX-FTA international experiment, which also involves the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is an attempt to develop nuclear fuels that go beyond U-235 fission, which would extend the useful range of radiactive fuel and reduce the quantity of hazardous radionuclides.
INL continued development of its Compton Dry-Cask Imaging Scanner, which allows inspection of storage casks without the cask being opened. The lab also enhanced its National Security Test Range by installing a flash X-ray system, which allows stop-motion imaging of bullets penetrating targets and other dynamic events that can’t be imaged using conventional high-speed video techniques.
With the flash system, researchers can see through smoke and fire to see how a projectile interacts with armor at the moment of impact.
The lab also touted the arrival of its fastest brain, a 16,416-processor Silicon Graphics International Corporation supercomputer known as “Falcon.”
The new computer is five times faster than the lab's previous mechanical genius, which was called “Fission,” which was put online in 2011.
As far as brainpower, the Falcon was ranked by Top500.org as the 97th fastest supercomputer in the world, capable of performing 500 trillion floating-point calculations per second.
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