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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.
K. A. Moreno, H. W. Xu, A. Nikroo, H. Huang, J. Fong, J. E. Knipping, J. L. Kaae, E. M. Giraldez
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 51 | Number 4 | May 2007 | Pages 581-585
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1448
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Rayleigh-Taylor experiments have been designed for the OMEGA laser facility at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) of the University of Rochester to explore perturbations during implosion of this ablator. For the experiment to be relevant, the beryllium copper flat used as the target must be similar in chemical makeup and morphology to the NIF ignition target. To visualize the perturbation growth, the flats were fabricated with sinusoidal perturbations on one side of a wavelength of 50 m and amplitude of 0.25 m. The flats were doped with more copper than required in the NIF ablator specification to increase the x-ray optical depth during burn through. These flats were successfully fabricated using a mold technique. This technique, as well as the characterization techniques used to verify the chemical makeup and thicknesses, will be described in this paper.