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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
D. W. Schmidt, J. I. Martinez
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 2 | August-September 2016 | Pages 254-257
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-225
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Specialized machining processes and programming have been developed to deliver thin tin and copper Richtmyer-Meshkov instability targets that have different amplitude perturbations across the face of one 4-in.-diameter target. Typical targets have anywhere from two to five different regions of sine waves that have different amplitudes varying from 4 to 200 μm across the face of the target. The puck is composed of multiple rings that are zero press fit together and diamond turned to create a flat platform with a tolerance of 2 μm for the shock experiment. A custom software program was written in Labview to write the point-to-point program for the diamond-turning profiler through the X-Y-Z movements to cut the pure planar straight sine wave geometry. The software is optimized to push the profile of the whole part into the face while eliminating any unneeded passes that do not cut any material.