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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.
D. L. Brower, W. X. Ding, V. V. Mirnov, M. A. Van Zeeland, T. N. Carlstrom
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 983-988
Plasma Engineering | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9038
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For future burning plasma experiments, all diagnostics must be re-evaluated in terms of their measurement capabilities and robustness in the harsh, high-temperature environment. This is certainly true for interferometry measurements where conventional approaches may not be ideal and interpretation may require modification due to high plasma temperatures. Optimizing these systems to provide maximum information is crucial to understanding burning plasma dynamics. This paper explores a variety of phase measurement techniques for the main body and divertor regions that can be utilized on fusion plasma experiments like ITER and beyond.