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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.
Yu. Igitkhanov, E. Polunovsky, C. D. Beidler
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 268-275
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1245
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The stellarator impurity transport code has been developed to describe the evolution of the impurity concentration and convective and diffusive fluxes of different charge states in time and space for given background plasma profiles in nonaxisymmetric devices. An extended model of neoclassical transport coefficients obtained by benchmarking of various methods has been employed for calculation of the radial electric field and for description of impurity ions. Calculations were performed mainly for light impurity species for background plasma profiles in high-density long-pulse Large Helical Device (LHD) discharges with and without an externally induced island at the edge and for W7-AS discharges with low and high confinement. It is shown that in the frame of neoclassical theory, the forces due to the radial electric field, the temperature gradient (convective terms), and the density gradient (diffusive term) mainly determine the impurity dynamics and eventually, together with atomic processes, the radial distribution of each ionization stage. Calculations show that in LHD discharges a different sign of the electric field (measured in experiment) within the island ensures the effective pumping of impurities within the island and their screening from penetration into the bulk plasma. It is shown that in the frame of purely neoclassical theory, the retention of impurities at the plasma edge, seen in the high-density H-mode of operation in W7-AS, cannot be explained.