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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.
D. Mueller, R. Raman, M. G. Bell, T. R. Jarboe, B. LeBlanc, R. Maqueda, S. Sabbagh, B. A. Nelson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 393-397
Technical Paper | The Technology of Fusion Energy - Experimental Devices and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1519
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Future toroidal magnetic confinement fusion plasma devices such as the Component Test Facility (CTF) require non-inductive toroidal current drive. A new method of non-inductive startup, referred to as transient coaxial helicity injection (Transient CHI), has been developed on the Helicity Injected Torus (HIT-II) experiment and the National Spherical Torus Experiment NSTX). In this method, plasma current is produced by discharging a capacitor bank between coaxial electrodes in the presence of toroidal and poloidal magnetic fields chosen such that the plasma rapidly expands into the chamber. When the injected current is rapidly decreased, magnetic reconnection occurs near the injection electrodes with the toroidal plasma current forming closed flux surfaces. In NSTX, transient CHI has demonstrated closed-flux current generation of up to 160 kA, without the use of a central solenoid. Detailed experimental measurements made on NSTX include fast time-scale visible imaging of the entire process.