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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.
K. Toi, M. Isobe, M. Osakabe, F. Watanabe, K. Ogawa, S. Yamamoto, N. Nakajima, D. A. Spong, K. Ida, T. Ido, T. Ito, S. Morita, K. Nagaoka, K. Narihara, M. Nishiura, S. Ohdachi, S. Sakakibara, A. Shimizu, K. Tanaka, Y. Todo, T. Tokuzawa, A. Weller, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 186-193
Chapter 4. MHD | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10805
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Energetic ion-driven magnetohydrodynamic instabilities such as Alfvén eigenmodes (AEs), energetic particle modes (EPMs), and their impacts on energetic ion confinement are being studied on the Large Helical Device (LHD). The magnetic configuration of this device is three dimensional and has negative magnetic shear over a whole radial region in the low-beta regime. Two types of toroidicity-induced Alfvén eigenmodes (TAEs) are typically observed in LHD plasmas that are heated by tangential neutral beam injection: One is localized in the plasma core region near a central TAE gap and the other is a global TAE having a radially extended eigenfunction. Core-localized TAEs with even and odd radial mode parities are often observed. The global TAE is usually observed in medium- to high-beta plasmas where broad regions with low magnetic shear are present. Helicity-induced Alfvén eigenmodes (HAEs), which exist in gaps unique to three-dimensional plasmas that have both toroidal and poloidal mode couplings, were detected for the first time. Recently, reversed magnetic shear Alfvén eigenmodes (RSAEs) having characteristic frequency sweeping were discovered in reversed magnetic shear (RS) plasmas produced by intense counter-neutral beam current drive. In the RS plasma, the geodesic acoustic mode (GAM) excited by energetic ions, which is a global-type mode different from localized GAM excited by drift waves, was also detected for the first time in a helical plasma. Nonlinear couplings between RSAE and GAM modes and also between two TAEs were observed. Bursts of TAEs and EPMs often enhance radial transport and loss of energetic ions at low toroidal magnetic field (<0.75 T).