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Latest News
DNFSB spots possible bottleneck in Hanford’s waste vitrification
Workers change out spent 27,000-pound TSCR filter columns and place them on a nearby storage pad during a planned outage in 2023. (Photo: DOE)
While the Department of Energy recently celebrated the beginning of hot commissioning of the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP), which has begun immobilizing the site’s radioactive tank waste in glass through vitrification, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board has reported a possible bottleneck in waste processing. According to the DNFSB, unless current systems run efficiently, the issue could result in the interruption of operations at the WTP’s Low-Activity Waste Facility, where waste vitrification takes place.
During operations, the LAW Facility will process an average of 5,300 gallons of tank waste per day, according to Bechtel, the contractor leading design, construction, and commissioning of the WTP. That waste is piped to the facility after being treated by Hanford’s Tanks Side Cesium Removal (TSCR) system, which filters undissolved solid material and removes cesium from liquid waste.
According to a November 7 activity report by the DNFSB, the TSCR system may not be able to produce waste feed fast enough to keep up with the LAW Facility’s vitrification rate.
D.R. Cohn, L. Bromberg, R.J. Leclaire, R.E. Potok, D.L. Jassby
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 1111-1116
Nuclear Technology Experiments and Facilities | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24881
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We discuss a super high field mode of tokamak operation that uses ohmic heating or near ohmic heating to ignition. This approach could also provide high values of nτe, increasing the margin of ignition in deuterium-tritium plasmas, and opening up the possibility of some type of advanced fuel operation. D-He3 operation might be possible if high enough values of β (β ≃ .09) can be obtained. The super high field mode of operation uses very high values of B2a, where B is the magnetic field and o is the minor radius (B2a > 100 T2m). We analyze copper magnet devices with major radii from 1.7 to 3.0 meters. Minimizing or eliminating the need for auxiliary heating has the potential advantages of reducing uncertainty in extrapolating the energy confinement time of current tokamak devices, and reducing engineering problems associated with large auxiliary heating requirements. It may be possible to heat relatively short pulse, inertially cooled tokamaks to ignition with ohmic power alone. However, there may be advantages in using a very small amount of auxiliary power (less than the ohmic heating power) to boost the ohmic heating and provide a faster start-up, especially in relatively compact devices.