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Latest News
DNFSB spots possible bottleneck in Hanford’s waste vitrification
Workers change out spent 27,000-pound TSCR filter columns and place them on a nearby storage pad during a planned outage in 2023. (Photo: DOE)
While the Department of Energy recently celebrated the beginning of hot commissioning of the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP), which has begun immobilizing the site’s radioactive tank waste in glass through vitrification, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board has reported a possible bottleneck in waste processing. According to the DNFSB, unless current systems run efficiently, the issue could result in the interruption of operations at the WTP’s Low-Activity Waste Facility, where waste vitrification takes place.
During operations, the LAW Facility will process an average of 5,300 gallons of tank waste per day, according to Bechtel, the contractor leading design, construction, and commissioning of the WTP. That waste is piped to the facility after being treated by Hanford’s Tanks Side Cesium Removal (TSCR) system, which filters undissolved solid material and removes cesium from liquid waste.
According to a November 7 activity report by the DNFSB, the TSCR system may not be able to produce waste feed fast enough to keep up with the LAW Facility’s vitrification rate.
M. Ichimura et al. (20R03)
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 51 | Number 2 | February 2007 | Pages 150-153
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems for Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1337
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In magnetically confined plasmas, fluctuations in the ion cyclotron range of frequency (ICRF) will be driven by the presence of non-thermal ion energy distributions. In a typical discharge in the GAMMA 10 tandem mirror, Alfvén-ion-cyclotron (AIC) modes are spontaneously excited due to strong temperature anisotropy. On the other hand, in fusion-oriented devices with a toroidal configuration, neutral beam (NB) injection is commonly used to create high performance plasmas. The resultant high-energy ions are trapped in local mirrors and will form velocity distributions with strong anisotropy. Especially in burning plasma experiments on JET and TFTR, fusion-product (FP) ions form non-thermal ion energy distributions in the bulk plasma and ion cyclotron emission (ICE) has been observed. The main purpose of this work is to study the relation between AIC-modes and ICEs in magnetically confined plasmas with non-thermal energy distributions. Recently, fluctuation measurements made by using ICRF antennas as pickup loops on JT-60U have been started. When the deuterium-NBs are injected into deuterium bulk plasma, magnetic fluctuations due to injected beams and FP ions are detected. Wave excitation near the ion cyclotron frequency and its higher harmonics is studied experimentally in plasmas with non-thermal ion energy distributions.
