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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.
D. Nishijima, Y. Kikuchi, M. Nakatsuka, M. J. Baldwin, R. P. Doerner, M. Nagata, Y. Ueda
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1447-1450
Interaction with Materials | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12703
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Sequential exposures of W surfaces to steady-state and pulsed (~0.5 ms) plasmas have been performed in a linear divertor plasma simulator and a magnetized coaxial plasma gun to investigate effects of D blisters, nano-sized He bubbles, and He-induced W fuzz on surface cracking by pulsed plasma loads. Surface cracks appeared on samples containing D blisters or He bubbles following 10 shots at ~0.5 MJ/m2 per shot, while a mirror-polished sample with no pre-plasma exposure did not exhibit cracks after similar transient exposures. Note that the cracking is limited to the edge region for a sample with D blisters. This means that the energy density threshold for surface cracking is lowered by the existence of D blisters and, especially, He bubbles. On the other hand, it is found that fuzzy surfaces possess a good resistance to surface cracking, although arcing is prone to occur.
