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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.
V. Mertens, C. Aubanel, O. Gruber, M. Kaufmann, G. Neu, G. Raupp, H. Richter, W. Treutterer, D. Zasche, Th. Zehetbauer, ASDEX Upgrade Team, NBI Team, ICRH Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 32 | Number 3 | November 1997 | Pages 459-467
Technical Paper | Plasma Control Issues for Tokamaks | doi.org/10.13182/FST97-A8
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) must run near operational limits to produce high-performance plasmas that, beyond position and shape control, rely on optimized control of additional plasma parameters. Control of single parameters, such as beta, plasma stored energy, or ion cyclotron resonance heating antenna coupling, has already been reported. Further performance improvements can be achieved by coordinated control of combinations of parameters. These may be specific to the different phases of a discharge, e.g., for radiative boundary concepts. A growing understanding of discharge behavior will lead to the identification of better control scenarios involving both new parameters and control methods. This requires a universal platform into which control algorithms can flexibly be integrated to adapt to interesting discharge scenarios. With the multitude of processes expected to be implemented, management of real-time processes becomes crucial. This paper explains how this issue is raised by the requirement specification of the controller and how it influences design, implementation, and operation of the plasma performance controller. Examples such as the achievement of completely detached H-mode plasmas demonstrate the working method and its effectiveness.