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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. Manzagol, G. Paquignon, D. Brisset, P. Bonnay, E. Bouleau, D. Chatain, M. Chichoux, D. Communal, V. Lamaison, J. P. Perin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 1 | January 2011 | Pages 159-165
Technical Paper | Nineteenth Target Fabrication Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11519
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Laser Mégajoule (LMJ) cryogenic target is protected from ambient thermal radiation by a thermal shroud. When the cryotarget, held by the cryotarget positioner, is at the LMJ chamber center, the thermal shroud has to be removed just before the shot to allow the laser beams to reach the laser entrance hole of the cavity.The shroud remover, PET, will have to disconnect the thermal shroud from the cryogenic target base without disturbing the target base temperature regulation ([approximately]18 K ± 2 mK), which guarantees the needed cryogenic target conditions to reach the ignition.The shroud withdrawal is divided into two successive phases: a slow withdrawal for the thermal disconnection between shroud and target base and a fast withdrawal for a quick extraction of the shroud out of the laser beamways pointing onto the cavity. The slow shroud withdrawal must be handled within 30 min to respect laser pointing stability. After the final target alignment at the chamber center, the shroud must be ejected 0.5 m away from the source point in <0.1 s before the shot.To cope with all these issues, a prototype of the shroud remover, PPET, has been first built and developed at CEA-Grenoble, at INAC/SBT, before being tested at CEA-CESTA on the DEMOCRYTE setup, a prototype of the cryogenic target charger and holder.The experimental results mainly obtained at CEA-CESTA in 2008 and 2009 on two generations of target bases and shrouds are presented in this paper.