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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.
Neil B. Morley, Albert Medina, Mohamed A. Abdou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 195-200
Tritium, Safety, and Environment | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8901
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Silicon Carbide (SiC) has been proposed as a possible candidate material for flow channel inserts for the dual coolant blanket concept. Here, the total electrical resistance of disks of high purity CVD SiC were measured with liquid lead-lithium eutectic (LLE) alloy melts serving as electrodes. From this data, the relative contributions of intrinsic resistivity and surface contact resistance as a function of measurement temperature was deduced. It was shown that after a relatively short period of exposure, once wetting at the interface was achieved, that contact resistance at the SiC/LLE interface was not significant. The contact resistance during initial exposure did not behave in a repeatable consistent way and appears to be affected by small variations in sample preparation. For modeling purposes, the electrical properties of an FCI can be based on the intrinsic electrical conductivity of the material and the dimensions. However, longer term operations and effects of impurities still need to be addressed.