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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
T. L. Rhodes, G. R. McKee, P. A. Politzer, D. W. Ross
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 2 | October 2005 | Pages 1042-1050
Technical Paper | DIII-D Tokamak - Achieving Reactor Quality Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1058
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Considerable research at DIII-D has been aimed at detailed comparisons of a variety of experimental fluctuation and turbulence measurements to turbulence simulations and theory. The goals of such comparisons are to improve the understanding of turbulence and transport as well as to test and provide feedback to the theory and simulations. Progress in this area will lead to confidence in the extrapolation of predictions to next-step fusion devices and, potentially, to improved control of transport. This paper summarizes some of the more recent and significant results of comparisons of experiment to theory and simulation that have been performed at DIII-D. These comparisons cover a range of plasma conditions (ohmic, L-mode, and impurity enhanced confinement), physical phenomena [transport, avalanches, zonal flows, and geodesic acoustic modes (GAMs)], and measurements (fluctuation levels, fluctuation spectra, radial correlation lengths, heat transport, and poloidal fluctuation velocity). Results reviewed here include comparisons between experimental turbulent radial correlation lengths and nonlinear turbulence simulations, measurements showing GAM activity (a type of zonal flow) similar to predictions, long-range or avalanche-type behavior with significant heat transport similar to that seen in nonlinear simulations, and reduction of turbulence with an enhancement of confinement during impurity injection similar to theory and simulation.