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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.
Mofreh R. Zaghloul
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 1 | January 2006 | Pages 28-38
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1083
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The molten salt Flinabe (LiF-NaF-BeF2) is proposed as a liquid wall material for future fusion reactors because of its many attractive aspects. High-temperature Flinabe gases (plasmas) appear in the inertial fusion energy chamber over a wide range of temperatures and pressures because of the absorption of X-rays and debris, emitted from the target microexplosion, within a very thin surface layer of the Flinabe liquid wall. The deposited energy heats the surface edge of the Flinabe wall to very high temperatures where vaporization, dissociation, and ionization take place and high-temperature plasma is generated. Equation-of-state (EOS) and ionization equilibrium data of the resulting high-temperature gas are needed to perform gas dynamics calculations and the required assessments of many research and development issues in nuclear fusion. Nevertheless, data for Flinabe EOS or ionization states are missing in the literature, and there is an immediate need to model and estimate these properties. In this paper, a self-consistent model for the ionization equilibrium and EOS of weakly nonideal high-temperature Flinabe gas is presented and used to compute the ionization equilibrium data and EOS of such an important material. Nonideality effects have been taken into account in terms of depression of the ionization potentials, coulombic correction to plasma kinetic pressure, and truncated partition functions. A reduced formulation and efficient algorithm to solve the set of nonlinear Saha equations subjected to the constraints of electroneutrality and conservation of nuclei have been used to generate ionization equilibrium and Flinabe EOS over a wide range of temperatures and pressures. A criterion for the validity of the assumption of local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) is applied to the results showing the regions of pressure-temperature phase-space over which the LTE assumption can be justified and accepted. Estimates of high-temperature Flinabe EOS and ionization states are presented and discussed.