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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.
Evelyn M. Fearon, Stephan A. Letts, Leslie M. Allison, Robert C. Cook
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 31 | Number 4 | July 1997 | Pages 406-410
Technical Paper | Eleventh Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST97-A30793
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper we describe our efforts to produce ICF target capsules with either controlled inner surface roughness or thin metallic diagnostic layers by adapting the decomposable mandrel technique previously developed at LLNL. To modify the capsule's inner surface we laser ablated a pattern on a poly(α-methylstyrene) (PAMS) shell, overcoated it with plasma polymer and then thermally decomposed the inner mandrel to leave the plasma polymer shell with the imprint of the laser ablated mandrel pattern. In this fashion we have been able to produce shells with controlled inner surface bumps. However, these bumps are correlated with outer surface pits. To place a thin metallic diagnostic layer on the inner capsule surface we applied a 50 Å titanium sputter coating to a smooth PAMS shell, overcoated with plasma polymer, and then thermally decomposed the mandrel to leave a plasma polymer shell with the titanium layer on the inner surface. Surface analysis showed that this process resulted in shells with a relatively long wavelength roughness, possibly due to the action of the metallic layer as a permeation barrier.