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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.
Jochen Linke
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 455-464
Technical Paper | Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics - Fusion Reactor Issues | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1144
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The first wall and the divertor in present-day or next step thermonuclear fusion devices are exposed to intense fluxes of charged and neutral particles, in addition the plasma facing materials and components are subjected to radiation in a wide spectral range. These processes, in general referred to as 'plasma wall interaction' will have strong influence on the plasma performance, and moreover, they have major impact on the degradation and on the lifetime of the plasma facing armour and the joining interface between the plasma facing material and the heat sink. Beside physical and chemical sputtering processes, thermal fatigue damage due to cyclic heat fluxes during normal operation and intense thermal shocks caused by severe thermal transients are of serious concern for the engineers which develop reliable wall components. In addition, the material and component degradation due to high fluxes of energetic neutrons is another critical issue in D-T-burning fusion devices which requires further extensive research activities. This paper represents a tutorial focussed on the development and characterization of plasma facing components for thermonuclear fusion devices.