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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.
H. Utoh, K. Nishimura, S. Inagaki, H. Takahashi, Y. Tanaka, M. Takenaga, M. Ogawa, J. Shinde, K. Iwazaki, A. Okamoto, K. Shinto, S. Kitajima, M. Sasao
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 3 | October 2006 | Pages 434-439
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1266
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the Tohoku University Heliac, a high-density plasma is produced by a vanadium electrode. The vanadium electrode is pretreated for hydrogen storage. In biasing experiments using the vanadium electrode, a high-density plasma is observed in not only argon plasmas but also helium plasmas. When the vanadium electrode is biased negatively, the radial distribution of the electron density steepens at the electrode position, and a strong negative radial electric field is formed between the electrode and the last closed flux surface. The E × B drift velocity is 30 km/s, and the estimated poloidal Mach number Mp is -20. The measured beta value exceeded 0.5% in the low-field discharges.