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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.
K. Akahane, N. Ezumi, Y. Uesugi, Y. Tanaka, M. Tanaka, K. Nishimura
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1343-1346
Detritiation and Isotope Separation | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12678
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Atmospheric pressure plasmas have many advantages for widespread applications since that are no necessary to use vacuum equipments. The work presented here is preliminary experimental results of hydrogen oxidation using an atmospheric pressure plasma. The experiment was done by a mixture gas included with a small amount of hydrogen and oxygen in an argon or a nitrogen plasma. As a result of mass spectrometry measurement, it has been found that hydrogen gas could be oxidized by the atmospheric pressure plasma. Moreover, dependence of the hydrogen conversion rate on the input power for discharge was confirmed. It has been also found that the hydrogen conversion rate in nitrogen plasma is higher than in argon one.