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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.
U. Samm
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 2 | February 2012 | Pages 193-198
Edge Physics and Exhaust | Proceedings of the Tenth Carolus Magnus Summer School on Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13506
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The control of wall loads in fusion devices, in particular with respect to the life time limitations of wall components due to material erosion and migration, will be decisive for the realisation of a fusion power plant operating in steady state, while in a pulsed experiment like ITER the primary goal for plasma-wall interaction is the achievement of a high availability. The article describes the grand challenges of plasma-wall interaction research along the needs for ITER and the strategies of ongoing research for further optimization of the design. Addressed are questions related to material limitations, erosion- and transport processes, tritium retention in deposited layers and transient heat loads.