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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.
S. Ohdachi, F. Watanabe, S. Yamamoto, K. Toi, C. Suzuki, K. Ida, S. Muto, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 418-425
Chapter 8. Diagnostics | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10827
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Several types of diagnostic system for soft X-ray radiation (SXR) have been developed and installed on the Large Helical Device (LHD). Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) activities are studied by the fluctuation component of SXR, and the electron temperature is measured from the spectrum of the SXR. PIN photodiode arrays are installed at three poloidal cross sections to study the equilibrium and fluctuations. The spatial resolution of an array is a few centimeters, and its frequency response is up to [approximately]300 kHz. Absolute extreme ultraviolet diode arrays are also used for lower-energy radiation, and edge MHD instabilities are thereby studied. There are tangentially viewing two-dimensional soft X-ray camera systems by which more detailed spatial structure can be studied. Radial profile of X-ray spectrum is measured by X-ray pulse height analyzer systems.