Instrumented Experiments
The movable vertical ex-core dry tubes can be loaded with an experiment and positioned against the east face of the reactor core, allowing for a wide range of reactor irradiation experiments. For instance, instrumented high-temperature furnaces have been used in these tubes to investigate material effects in fiber optics in a high-temperature radiation environment. Furnace rigs up to 1200 °C have been used, and a rig for a 1600 °C experiment is being developed. Instrumented ultra-cold experiments have also been run in the 9.5 inch tube using a cryostat to cool fiber optics and electronics to about 4 Kelvin while being irradiated by the reactor. With the reactor at maximum power, the neutron flux in either of these dry tubes positioned next to the core is ≈1x1012 n/cm2/s, and experiments with neutron fluence on the order of 1x1017 nv can typically be performed.