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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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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.
J. P. Catalán, J. Sanz, F. Ogando, R. Pampin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 62 | Number 1 | July-August 2012 | Pages 190-195
Blanket Materials Technology | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Fusion Reactor Materials, Part A: Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-425
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Under the Spanish Breeding Blanket Technology Program TECNO_FUS, a conceptual design of a dual-coolant lithium-lead (DCLL) blanket for DEMO is being revisited. In this work, different shielding candidate materials are assessed in their ability to satisfy the radiation load requirements that must be fulfilled in the toroidal field (TF) coils: absorbed dose in the insulator (Epoxy), peak fast neutron fluence in the superconductor (Nb3Sn), peak nuclear heating in the winding pack and maximum neutron fluence in the cooper stabilizer. Furthermore, the impact of the material choice on waste management requirements of both shielding and vacuum vessel (VV) materials is evaluated, and the performance of candidate materials is examined in terms of the helium production in the VV SS316LN material and its implications in reweldability. Materials discussed for the High Temperature Shield are Eurofer, graphite, B4C, WC and WB4C, while the metal hydrides ZrH2, Zr(BH4)4, and TiH2 are discussed for the Low Temperature Shield. In the case of DEMO irradiation scenario, all the analyzed material combinations fulfill the design requirements for the waste management of the shield and VV, He production in the VV wall and TF coils radiation loads requirements.
