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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.
Oleg I. Buzhinskij, Yuri M. Semenets
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 32 | Number 1 | August 1997 | Pages 1-13
Technical Paper | First-Wall Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST97-A19875
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A review of some characteristic features of the boronization process, properties of boron-carbon films, and the influence of these features on tokamak discharges is presented. Boronization, as defined here, is a plasma chemical vapor deposition of a thin a-B/C:H film on the first wall of fusion reactors. As a result of boronization, oxygen, carbon, and heavy impurities (e.g., iron, nickel, and chromium) are suppressed, and hydrogen recycling is reduced, which substantially improves the characteristics of tokamak discharges. A two-stage complex protection of both the first wall by boronization and of limiters, divertor plates, and radio-frequency antennas by the application of thick B4C coatings provides further improvement of tokamak plasma parameters.
