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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.
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.
