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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.
Bong-Ki Jung, Soon-Wook Jung, Jae-Ryung Lee, Kyoung-Jae Chung, Y. S. Hwang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 107-111
doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12415
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion device has been investigated as a compact fusion source to generate byproducts of fusion reactions for many applications. However, the IEC fusion device still has insufficient fusion reaction rate and stability issues in high power operation. In this work, a cylindrical IEC device is designed and discharge voltage and current at various pressures and geometries are studied to understand their effect on discharge. From this result, three key features is observed and discussed: 1) discharge voltage in IEC device increases with lower transparent cathode at the identical operating pressure, 2) high voltage and current discharge can be obtained with higher operating pressure at the identical pd value. 3) high voltage discharge without decrease of operating pressure can be obtained by considering limit length of cathode diameter in IEC device. Based on these results, it is supposed that transparency and size of cathode in an IEC device can be optimized for high voltage and current discharge with relatively high operating pressure to increase fusion reactions of beam-cathode surface and beam-background gas besides ion-ion fusion reaction in continuous IEC discharge. Consequently, these results can be reflected on design of a high-yield fusion sources.