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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.
L. Liu, F. K. Liu, H. Jia, W. H. Zhu, L. M. Zhao, X. J. Wang, J. F. Shan, B. J. Ding, M. H. Li, Y. Yang, J. Q. Feng, Z. G. Wu, Y. Li, M. Cheng, L. Xu, J. Wang, T. A. Zhou, J. G. Li
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 1 | January 2019 | Pages 49-58
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2018.1516416
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new 4.6-GHz lower hybrid (LH) current drive (CD) (LHCD) launcher has been successfully developed in the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) to achieve long-pulse high-performance plasma. It is capable of coupling up to 6 MW of LH power into the plasma with a parallel index N// from 1.79 to 2.23. Before manufacturing the launcher, key component mock-ups were fabricated and tested to validate the radio-frequency (RF) design and the process feasibility. Test results show good agreement with the design value. So far, up to 3.5 MW of net LHCD power was injected into the plasma, and long-pulse operation capability has been demonstrated: 1.26 MW and 100.4 s, suggesting that the new launcher can effectively couple the microwave energy into plasma, to drive current and extend the high-performance plasma. In this paper, some of the RF design, construction, testing, and recent experimental results of the new launcher are presented.