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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.
E. T. Cheng, C. P. C. Wong Ga
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 1 | July 1983 | Pages 164-169
Technical Paper | Nonelectrial Applications | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22782
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A scoping study was performed to explore tritium breeding and energy-temperature splits in various blanket concepts for high-temperature process heat. Temperature limits for the lithium materials necessitate two blanket zones. One delivers heat at moderate temperatures (≾600°C) and breeds tritium. The other is a nonbreeding zone that produces heat at high temperatures. We find that a system where all blanket modules breed tritium delivers more high-temperature heat than one where only some of the blanket modules produce tritium. Of those considered, a design where the high-temperature zone is placed between two breeding zones produces the highest fraction of high-temperature heat. When liquid lithium, Li7Pb2 and Li2O tritium breeding materials are employed with two breeding zones, a tritium breeding ratio of 1.1 can be achieved while delivering 30 to 40% of the blanket heat at high temperature.