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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.
P.F. Peterson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 39 | Number 2 | March 2001 | Pages 702-710
Chamber Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST01-A11963321
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High-temperature, low-vapor-pressure liquid jets can provide neutron shielding for inertial fusion energy (IFE) target chambers. To minimize pumping power, free liquid jets must be located close to the target to reduce the total liquid volume required for shielding each fusion shot. For heavy ion drivers compact liquid geometry provides additional benefits by reducing focus-magnet stand off distance. The disruption of the liquid by targets involves complex fluid mechanics, as does the subsequent droplet clearing and pocket regeneration. The ranges of time, length, and energy-density scales in IFE target chambers are extreme compared to most engineered systems. Scaling, discussed in detail here, can identify optimal approaches to study and model liquid response, and minimize experimental distortion. More broadly, the systematic categorization of IFE phenomena by duration and location is shown to provide a natural format for selecting experiments to study IFE phenomena ranging from beam transport to chamber activation.