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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.
Jeffrey Doody, Robert Granetz, Damao Yao, William Beck, Lihua Zhou, Zibo Zhou, Lei Cao, Xuan Xia, Rui Vieira, Stephen Wukitch, James Irby
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 582-586
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-928
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Plasma Physics (ASIPP) Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) has designed and built a new outer divertor with an ITER-like cooling system. As part of a joint collaboration, the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT performed analyses on the EAST design to determine loading, stresses and deflections due to the eddy currents and halo currents occurring during a disruption. The analysis was done using the finite element program COMSOL using techniques developed at MIT to recreate actual tokamak discharges from measured data. This technique has been used successfully to recreate discharges from Alcator C-Mod, a high field tokamak with TZM tiles at the Plasma Science Fusion Center at MIT, and allows us to recreate the fields for any disruption from the EAST data base. For the new divertor, an upward moving disruption was chosen as the design scenario.
The plasma filament model predicts fields, eddy currents and loads due to a disruption, but the divertor will also be exposed to halo currents. The new EAST divertor borrows its cooling system design from ITER where the plasma facing tungsten tiles are water cooled by a CuCrZr manifold and pipes attached to the tiles. Halo currents traveling down these tubes and crossing the toroidal field will result in large loads in these components, and COMSOL is used to predict the stresses and deflections. The model predicts that the EAST divertor will survive the combined loading due to the eddy and halo currents.