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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.
J. L. Duchateau, J. Y. Journeaux, B. Gravil
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 3 | October 2009 | Pages 1092-1123
Technical Papers | Tore Supra Special Issue | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9170
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We review the main design choices for the toroidal field system and associated cryogenic system for Tore Supra, which introduced the use of 1.8K superfluid helium as coolant for a large NbTi magnet system. The main steps of the system commissioning are presented, with a description of the main difficulties encountered, showing the evolution of the monitoring and of the safety system to take into account the lessons drawn from the first operating experience.The impact of plasma operations such as plasma initiation, long plasma discharges, and disruption is given in detail, highlighting their impact on cryogenics, which remains in all cases weak. The fast safety discharges (FSDs) of the system can disturb normal operation. Origin of and statistics about FSDs are discussed, detailing efforts to decrease their number.Finally, maintenance and monitoring of the cryogenic system and of the various sensors are presented with some consideration regarding the aging of the system and its overall availability. Details are given regarding minor failures on components all along the operation. Overall, the accumulated experience is certainly a useful tool to prepare the manufacture and operation of the ITER superconducting magnets despite the differences in design and size.