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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.
D. A. Hartmann
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 43-55
Technical Paper | Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics - Introduction | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1103
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Stellarators are toroidal devices where the required rotational transform of the magnetic field lines is generated by external field coils and not via an induced net toroidal plasma current. This confinement scheme has the advantages that, in principle, steady-state plasma operation is possible and that it does not have to brace itself against disruptions of a toroidal plasma current. At the cost of having to give up toroidal symmetry the properties of the stellarator field can be tailored to suit reactor needs. Research focuses on the plasma confinement properties of different stellarator fields and investigates the problems arising when one extrapolates to reactor parameters.