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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.
S. Krupakar Murali, John F. Santarius, Gerald L. Kulcinski
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 3 | April 2008 | Pages 841-853
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1739
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent study of fusion reactions within an inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) device revealed several significant modes of fusion: converged core, beam-target, beam-background, and charge-exchange reactions. In an attempt to understand the fusion product proton measurements in the IEC device, the advanced fuel D-D and D-3He fusion proton energy spectra were analyzed. For D-3He fusion, the beam-target reactions were found to dominate. Hence, the present study focuses on understanding the beam-target reactions and the corresponding proton energy spectra from such sources. This information helps in accurately calculating the proton flux for optimizing medical isotope production and other near-term applications, besides calibration of the proton detectors.A proton detector was used to measure the experimental data and the Monte Carlo stopping power and range in matter (SRIM) simulation code was used to explain the corresponding experimental observations. While the D-D proton spectrum from the IEC device showed combined Doppler and scatter broadening, the D-3He proton spectrum, besides showing the broadening, also shows some interesting characteristics such as a high-energy tail and a detector thickness-dependent energy spectrum. An extended high-energy tail occurs in the observed energy spectrum from the detector because some of the protons go through the wire before being detected, which reduces their total energy. Due to the higher proton stopping power in the detector at somewhat lower energies than the initial 14.7 MeV, these protons thus deposit a larger fraction of their energy and create the high-energy tail. These measurements show that the high-energy tail of the proton energy spectrum should be excluded from the total proton counts for an accurate proton rate measurement.