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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.
Koichi Maki, Takashi Okazaki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 3 | November 1983 | Pages 468-478
Technical Papers | Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22796
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Effects of blanket composition, including materials and their thicknesses, on the tritium breeding ratio in tokamak fusion reactors are investigated for the Li20 blanket having a separable first wall. The sensitivities of the breeding ratio to the thicknesses of the materials for the first wall are estimated as follows (unit: TBR/cm): Ssic= −.05, Scu= −.13, SAl= −.04, Sss= −.03, SHe= 0.0, SD2o= −.02, SH2o= −.09. From these results, aluminum and stainless steel are seen as suitable for such first-wall structural materials as cooling tubes, and heavy water is appropriate for the coolant of the first wall. The lead multiplier of 5-cm thickness is used along with Li20, without 6Li enrichment, as the tritium breeding material. The tritium breeding ratio of the blanket is estimated as 1.08.