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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. Van Eester, E. Lerche
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 2 | February 2012 | Pages 331-346
Kinetic Wave Theory | Proceedings of the Tenth Carolus Magnus Summer School on Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13520
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the present paper a very brief introduction is provided to the theory of kinetic waves relevant to the description of wave heating in fusion machines and focussing mostly on radio frequency or ion cyclotron resonance frequency waves in tokamaks. The text starts by sketching the basic philosophy underlying the standardly adopted methods, describing the interaction of a single particle with a given wave and the assumptions typically made to arrive at a trustworthy description of the energy exchange, and ends by discussing some of the subtleties of the modeling of wave-particle interaction in inhomogeneous magnetized plasmas. None of the topics will be treated in full detail. Hence, by no means, this text is meant to be all-inclusive. Rather, it aims at providing a framework that should allow understanding what are the difficulties involved, leaving out the detailed derivation of the expressions as well as subtleties such as relativistic corrections. The interested reader is referred to the provided references - and the references given therein - for more in depth information.