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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.
D. L. Hillis, J. T. Hogan, P. Andrew, J. Ehrenberg, M. Groth, M. von Hellermann, L.D. Horton, R. Monk, P. Morgan, M. Stamp
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 34 | Number 3 | November 1998 | Pages 941-945
Plasma Facing Components Technology (Poster Session) | doi.org/10.13182/FST98-A11963734
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Future fusion reactors, like ITER, will rely on an active exhaust system to pump tritium (T) in the divertor and then recirculate it to the fuel stream. Estimation of the T inventory requires a detailed T balance, which determines if T is preferentially enriched relative to D in its pathway from the main plasma to the divertor and pump. On the Joint European Torus (JET), the neutral T concentration in the sub-divertor (pumping plenum and region below the divertor strike point plate) is measured with a modified Penning gauge coupled to a high-resolution spectrometer. In addition, T concentration measurements are made in the plasma edge and strike point region with a spectrometer viewing these regions. The sub-divertor and divertor (region above the strike point plate) T concentration measurements show differences during initial T uptake and retention which are characteristic of wall deposition properties. Since wall retention is one of the factors in calculating the eventual T inventory in a reactor, a detailed study of this process has been undertaken.