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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
R. R. Paguio, S. P. Paguio, C. A. Frederick, A. Nikroo, O. Acenas
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 4 | May 2006 | Pages 743-749
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1195
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Poly(-methylstyrene) (PAMS) shells are made by microencapsulation and used in the fabrication of a large variety of targets for the inertial confinement fusion (ICF) program. Although this process has previously been developed into production mode, the yield of shells with acceptable sphericity and wall uniformity in the OMEGA size range (800-1000 m) has been poor (~ 18%). We have made improvements in the yield of these shells by modifying the composition of the outer water solution (W2) in the microencapsulation emulsion. This improvement was achieved by increasing the concentration of Poly Vinyl Alcohol (PVA) from 0.3% to 1.0% and an addition of 0.1% Poly Acrylic Acid (PAA). These modifications were aimed at increasing the interfacial surface tension in the emulsion but also appear to have played a role in density matching the components in the PAMS emulsion. These modifications improved the out of round (OOR) and non-concentricity (NC) of the PAMS mandrels resulting in as increase in the yield of target quality batches based on these basic criteria from 18% to over 80%. Meanwhile, the vacuole content and the surface finish of the PAMS shells were not adversely affected by these changes.