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The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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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.
C. G. Bathke, R. A. Krakowski, K. F. Schoenberg
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 15 | Number 2 | March 1989 | Pages 1082-1087
Plasma Heating and Current Drive — II | doi.org/10.13182/FST89-A39836
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The property of reversed-field pinches (RFPs) to relax to a near-minimum-energy state is the basis of oscillating-field current drive (OFCD), wherein plasma current is driven by modulating in quadrature the external toroidal and poloidal magnetic fields. Coupled plasma/circuit OFCD simulations of RFPs ranging from present experiments (ZT-P and ZT-40M) to the reactor (TITAN) indicate that the drive frequency and the amplitude of the plasma-current oscillations decrease and the “wall-plug” current-drive efficiency increases with decreased plasma resistance so that minimum frequencies (∼25 Hz) and plasma-current amplitudes (∼1.6%) and maximum efficiencies (∼0.3 A/W) are attained in the reactor regime. Methods for minimizing the reactive powers and for optimizing the current-drive efficiency for OFCD in RFPs have been identified.
