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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.
J. K. Anderson et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 1 | January 2011 | Pages 27-30
doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11567
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new 1 MW neutral beam injector (START-20F) is in operation on the Madison Symmetric Torus (MST) reversed field pinch. The beam, consisting of two arc discharge plasma generators, an optimized ion optical system and an integrated neutralizer/injector tank, operates at 25kV and up to 40A of neutrals for a 20 msec pulse (compared to a typical MST pulse length of 60 msec). The injected 1 MW of hydrogen neutrals (with approximately 85% in the full energy component) is significant compared to the 3-4 MW of ohmic input power in a typical target discharge. At this beam energy and a background electron density of about 1x1019 m-3 and temperature 1keV, roughly 90% of the injected power is deposited within the plasma. Initial experiments with the high power NBI show a large heating of the bulk ions: the fit of the width of energy spectrum as measured by Rutherford scattering (which is generally related to core ion temperature) quickly increases from 180eV to 230eV. This apparent significant and rapid heating of bulk ions is difficult to explain by classical collisions only, as modeling predicts 75% of the injected power is deposited on electrons and 15% on ions. The confinement of the fast ions (measured by the persistence in time of fusion neutrons due to a small fraction of deuterium in the beam fuel) is much greater than the canonical 1 msec confinement of particles and energy in the MST. The fast particle confinement is measured to increase with magnetic field strength. Further recent experiments document fast particle confinement time versus direction of injection (parallel or antiparallel to central magnetic field), beam energy, and background plasma properties.