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Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
William S. Cooper
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 632-641
Plasma Heating, Impurity Control, and Fueling | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22932
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Negative-ion-based neutral beam systems can perform multiple functions for fusion reactors, such as heating, current drive in tokamak reactors, and establishing and maintaining potential barriers in tandem mirror reactors. Practical systems operating continuously at the 200 keV, 1 MW level can be built using present-day technology. Ion sources have been demonstrated that produce D− beams with <5% electron content, and that operate at linear current densities that are within a factor of 2 of what conservatively designed accelerator/transport structures can handle. Concepts are in hand for transporting the negative ion beam through a neutron maze before neutralization, thus permitting a radiation-hardened beamline. With an advanced laser photoneutralizer, overall system power efficiencies of 70% should be possible. A national program is being planned to achieve the goal of application of 475 keV systems on a mirror ETR in 1994.