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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.
I. García-Cortés, F. L. Tabarés, D. Tafalla, R. Balbín, J. M. Carmona, A. Hidalgo, J. A. Ferreira, A. López-Fraguas, K. J. McCarthy, V. I. Vargas, TJ-II Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 307-312
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1251
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutral beam injection (NBI) heating in the TJ-II stellarator faces the particular challenge of unwanted particle sources, which for relatively low injected powers drive the plasma to collapse at relatively low values of line density. This effect is aggravated by an enhancement of particle confinement that occurs as density increases. At present, candidate magnetic topologies that make use of intrinsic islands at the plasma edge are being investigated experimentally. This concept uses magnetic configurations having a rotational transform with a rational value at the edge, i.e., an island divertor (ID). Recently, impurity injection experiments have been performed for ID and limiter configurations to investigate the divertor effect in TJ-II. Indeed, the enhanced screening of injected impurities, as well as the low intrinsic plasma contamination found in these ID plasmas, points to such magnetic configurations as being good candidates for the NBI experimental program in TJ-II.