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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.
A. Komori, H. Yamada, S. Imagawa, O. Kaneko, K. Kawahata, K. Mutoh, N. Ohyabu, Y. Takeiri, K. Ida, T. Mito, Y. Nagayama, S. Sakakibara, R. Sakamoto, T. Shimozuma, K. Y. Watanabe, O. Motojima for LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 1-11
Chapter 1. Introduction | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST58-1
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Large Helical Device (LHD) is a heliotron-type device employing large-scale superconducting magnets to enable advanced studies of net-current-free plasmas. The major goal of the LHD experiment is to demonstrate the high performance of helical plasmas in a reactor-relevant plasma regime. Engineering achievements and operational experience greatly contribute to the technological basis for a fusion energy reactor. Thorough exploration for scientific and systematic understanding of the physics in the LHD is an important step to a helical fusion reactor. In the 12 years since the initial operation, the physics database as well as operational experience has been accumulated, and the advantages of stable and steady-state features have been demonstrated by the combination of advanced engineering and the intrinsic physical advantages of helical systems in the LHD. The cryogenic system has been operated for 56 000 h in total without any serious trouble and routinely provides a confining magnetic field up to 2.96 T in steady state. The heating capability to date is 23 MW of neutral beam injection, 3 MW of ion cyclotron resonance frequency, and 2.5 MW of electron cyclotron resonance heating. Highlighted physical achievements are high beta (5.1%), high density (1.2 × 1021 m-3), and steady-state operation (3200 s with 490 kW).