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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
Hiroshi Tamai, Shinichi Ishida, Gen-Ichi Kurita, Hiroshi Shirai, Katsuhiko Tsuchiya, Shinji Sakurai, Makoto Matsukawa, Akira Sakasai
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 4 | June 2004 | Pages 521-528
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A527
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A 1.5-dimensional time-dependent transport analysis has been carried out to investigate steady-state operation scenarios with a central current hole by off-axis current drive schemes consistent with a high bootstrap current fraction for the JT-60SC large superconducting tokamak. A steady-state operation scenario with HHy2 = 1.4 and N = 3.7 has been obtained at Ip = 1.5 MA, Bt = 2 T, and q95 = 5, where noninductive currents are developed during the discharge to form a current hole with beam-driven currents by tangential off-axis beams in combination with bootstrap currents by additional on-axis perpendicular beams. The bootstrap fraction increases up to ~75% of the plasma current, and the current hole region is enlarged up to ~30% of the minor radius at 35 s from the discharge initiation. The current hole is confirmed to be sustained afterward for a long duration of 60 s. The present transport simulation shows that heating equipment designed for JT-60SC is capable of forming and sustaining the current hole only by using off-axis beam-driven currents and bootstrap currents. The stability analysis shows that the beta limit with the conducting wall can be ~N = 4.5, which is substantially above the no-wall ideal magnetohydrodynamic limit.