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Latest News
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.
Boris Breizman
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 3 | April 2011 | Pages 549-560
Lecture | Fourth ITER International Summer School (IISS2010) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11696
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The buildup of the energetic particle population in fusion plasmas is typically slow compared to the growth times of energetic-particle driven instabilities. This feature draws special attention to nonlinear studies of unstable waves in the near-threshold regimes. The goal is to characterize the long-time behavior of the weakly dissipative waves and resonant particles in the presence of particle sources and sinks. There are numerous experimental observations of energetic-particle driven instabilities. In some cases the unstable modes grow to a level at which they cause enhanced transport and anomalous losses of the fast particles. In other cases the losses are small but the modes exhibit an intricate nonlinear behavior: generation of sidebands, quasi-periodic bursts, change of the mode frequency in time, etc. This lecture, presented at the 4th ITER International Summer School in Austin, Texas, provides a first-principles physics basis for understanding these phenomena.