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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.
M. Wisse, L. Marot, R. Steiner, D. Mathys, A. Stumpp, M. Joanny, J. M. Travère, E. Meyer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 2 | October 2014 | Pages 308-314
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-771
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to extend the investigation of laser-assisted cleaning of ITER-relevant first mirror materials to the picosecond regime, a commercial laser system delivering 10-ps pulses at 355 nm at a frequency of up to 1 MHz has been used to investigate the ablation of mixed aluminum (oxide)/tungsten (oxide) layers deposited on polycrystalline and nanocrystalline molybdenum as well as nanocrystalline rhodium mirrors. Characterization before and after cleaning using scanning electron microscopy and spectrophotometry shows heavy dust formation, resulting in a degradation of the reflectivity. Cleaning using 5-ns pulses at 350 and 532 nm, on the other hand, proved very promising. The structure of the film remnants suggests that in this case buckling was the underlying removal mechanism rather than ablation. Repeated coating and cleaning using nanosecond pulses is demonstrated.