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DNFSB spots possible bottleneck in Hanford’s waste vitrification
Workers change out spent 27,000-pound TSCR filter columns and place them on a nearby storage pad during a planned outage in 2023. (Photo: DOE)
While the Department of Energy recently celebrated the beginning of hot commissioning of the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP), which has begun immobilizing the site’s radioactive tank waste in glass through vitrification, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board has reported a possible bottleneck in waste processing. According to the DNFSB, unless current systems run efficiently, the issue could result in the interruption of operations at the WTP’s Low-Activity Waste Facility, where waste vitrification takes place.
During operations, the LAW Facility will process an average of 5,300 gallons of tank waste per day, according to Bechtel, the contractor leading design, construction, and commissioning of the WTP. That waste is piped to the facility after being treated by Hanford’s Tanks Side Cesium Removal (TSCR) system, which filters undissolved solid material and removes cesium from liquid waste.
According to a November 7 activity report by the DNFSB, the TSCR system may not be able to produce waste feed fast enough to keep up with the LAW Facility’s vitrification rate.
Oliver Schmitz
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 2 | February 2012 | Pages 221-229
Edge Physics and Exhaust | Proceedings of the Tenth Carolus Magnus Summer School on Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13509
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Controlling the transport in the plasma edge of high temperature plasmas has recently been extended by a sophisticated option - the stochastization of the magnetic cage confining the plasma. The idea is to induce a chaotic magnetic field structure in the edge which can act as a magnetic valve to control heat and particle fluxes between the confined plasma and the plasma facing components. This tool is applied in both, stellarators as well as tokamaks. In this lecture an introduction into the topic will be given. The topics are (a) generation and structure of chaotic magnetic edge layers, (b) plasma transport with stochastic magnetic fields including the resulting three-dimensional plasma wall interaction and (c) impact of a plasma response. However, this field is matter of intense ongoing research and hence this lecture gives a systematic introduction into the challenges based on examples from the TEXTOR tokamak.