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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.
Masaaki Yamada
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 9 | Number 1 | January 1986 | Pages 38-47
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24699
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A review of experimental spheromak research is presented, together with prospects of near-future experiments and some reactor considerations. In the several experiments based on different schemes, a major effort has recently been made to improve the global magnetohydrodynamic stability and plasma parameters. Electron temperatures sufficiently high to exceed the low-Z radiation barrier have been achieved, and the extensive study of the transport characteristics has begun, aiming to attain more reactor-relevant plasmas with larger current. Finally, an improved conceptual design of a small spheromak reactor is presented, based on a flux injection technique recently developed at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.