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Fusion Science and Technology
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.
O. Meneghini, S. Shiraiwa, I. Faust, R. R. Parker, A. Schmidt, G. Wallace
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 40-47
doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12403
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Non-inductive lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) experiments have been carried out on the Alcator C-Mod tokamak and the hard x-ray (HXR) spectrum has been measured. An improved analysis technique of the experimental HXR data has been developed to more accurately evaluate the HXR flux for this type of discharge. We have simulated a similar LHCD discharge with the full wave code LHEAF (Lower Hybrid wavE Analysis based on FEM). This code, combined with the newly developed 3D Fokker-Planck (v∥, v⊥, r) and synthetic HXR diagnostic modules, to calculate the steady state electron distribution function in the plasma and the resulting HXR radiation spectrum. The simulated non-thermal x-ray proflle shave been found to be in good agreement with the measured experimental profile. In particular LHEAF simulations were able to reproduce the broad width of the measured HXR profile for a discharge with low n∥, which has been a long standing issue for LHCD simulations on Alcator C-Mod.