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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
N. Tamura, S. Inagaki, T. Tokuzawa, C. Michael, K. Tanaka, K. Ida, T. Shimozuma, S. Kubo, K. Itoh, Y. Nagayama, K. Kawahata, S. Sudo, A. Komori, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 122-130
Chapter 3. Confinement and Transport | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10799
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The observation of a significant rise of the core electron temperature Te in response to edge cooling in a helical plasma was first made on the Large Helical Device (LHD). When the phenomenon takes place, the core electron heat flux is reduced abruptly without changing the thermodynamic values in the region of interest (core). Thus, the phenomenon observed in LHD can be equated to a "nonlocal transport phenomenon," observed so far only in tokamaks. The nonlocal transport phenomenon in LHD takes place in almost the same parametric domain (i.e., in a high-temperature and low-density regime) as in tokamaks. Meanwhile, various new aspects of the nonlocal transport phenomenon have been revealed by the LHD experiments; for example, (1) in LHD, the nonlocal transport phenomenon has been observed in net current-free plasmas sustained only by electron cyclotron heating. This experimental result can completely rule out the contribution of the toroidal plasma current as a reason for the nonlocal transport phenomenon. (2) It has been found that during the nonlocal transport phenomenon, there appears a strong correlation between core electron heat flux and edge Te gradient on a timescale shorter than the diffusion time and a spatial scale longer than the microturbulence correlation length. At that time, it was also found that an envelope of density fluctuations is modulated with a low frequency (2 kHz), which suggests the existence of a long-ranged turbulent structure in the plasma, where the nonlocal transport phenomenon can appear.