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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.
Kazuhisa Yuki, Hidetoshi Hashizume, Saburo Toda
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 238-242
Divertor & High Heat Flux Components | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12359
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A sub-channels-inserted porous evaporator is proposed as a heat removal device of the divertor with a heat load exceeding 10 MW/m2. The porous medium is made by sintering copper particles of micro size in diameter and has several sub-channels to enhance discharge of generated vapor outside the porous medium. This porous cooling devise is attached onto the backside of the divertor and remove the heat by evaporating water passing through the porous medium against the heat flow. In order to prove the effect of the sub-channels, the heat transfer characteristics of this porous device are evaluated experimentally using a plasma arcjet as a high heat flux source. The result shows that the heat transfer performance of copper-particles-sintered porous medium with the sub-channels enables to remove much higher heat flux under lower flow rate and lower wall superheat conditions, compared with the normal porous media. The removal heat flux, 8.1 MW/m2, is 1.8 times as higher than that of the normal porous medium at a wall superheat of 50 degrees (the heat transfer coefficient, 1.6 × 105 W/m2/K, is 2.4 times as higher). The removal heat flux reaches almost 10 MW/m2 although the wall superheat exceeds 100 degrees (The wall temperature is approximately 220 degrees C. still in a fully developed boiling regime). In addition, the removal heat flux exceeds 20 MW/m2 by increasing the number of the sub-channels under lower wall superheat conditions, which proves high potential of the sub-channels-inserted porous evaporator.
