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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.
K. Youngblood, C. Alford, S. Bhandarkar, J. Hayes, K. Moreno, A. Nikroo, H. Xu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 1 | January 2011 | Pages 126-132
Technical Paper | Nineteenth Target Fabrication Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-3692
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Sputter coating of beryllium on spherical mandrels has been used at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and at General Atomics to produce graded, copper doped beryllium shells. While these coatings have consistent microstructure and acceptable void content, different coaters produced different results with respect to argon implantation. Each individual system met the requirements for argon implantation, but the deviation from one system to another and from run to run exceeded the variability requirements as specified by the National Ignition Facility target design requirements. We redesigned the fixturing within one system to improve reproducibility. Then, we reconfigured the coaters so that the vertical and lateral alignments of the shells under the gun varied <1 mm between systems. After this process, the systems were able to produce beryllium capsules with radial argon profiles that met specifications and were consistent from run to run and from system to system. During this process we gained insight into the beryllium coating process. The radial argon variation was shown to be dependent on sputter target thickness. We also found that the argon content in the shells was extremely dependent on the position of the shells with respect to the gun.