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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.
B. G. Hong, J. H. Seo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 533-537
Blanket Design and Experiments | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12437
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To determine the radial build of tokamak reactor systems, a one-dimensional radiation transport code is coupled with the system analysis. Neutronic effects such as the tritium breeding capability and the shielding characteristics are self-consistently calculated in the system analysis which allows a determination of the design parameters of a reactor which satisfy plasma physics and engineering constraints simultaneously. We apply this coupled analysis to determine the radial build of tokamak reactor systems and show that it is a powerful tool for the optimal design of a tokamak reactor.