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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.
T. Morisaki, S. Masuzaki, R. Sakamoto, M. Kobayashi, N. Ohyabu, H. Yamada, A. Komori, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 232-241
Chapter 5. Divertor and Edge Physics | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10810
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To achieve an improvement of plasma confinement by an effective edge plasma control, the local island divertor (LID) was originally proposed in the National Institute for Fusion Science in the early 1980s. The LID is a kind of island divertor that utilizes the island separatrix as the channeling magnetic structure of the divertor, and it has the particular characteristic of localizing the particle recycling in very small areas. Thus, it is possible to construct a compact closed divertor configuration with efficient pumping capability, which results in the low-recycling condition in the edge region. In this paper the LID project is reviewed, from the physics design phase with numerical validation or estimation of the LID principle to a recent experimental result of the superdense core mode, which is a promising discharge for next-generation devices.