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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
D. T. Frey, N. B. Alexander, A. S. Bozek, D. T. Goodin, R. W. Stemke, T. J. Drake, D. Bitner
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 51 | Number 4 | May 2007 | Pages 786-790
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1480
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The High Average Power Laser (HAPL) Program is a national program to develop Inertial Fusion Energy with lasers (http://aries.ucsd.edu/HAPL/), direct drive targets and solid wall chambers. General Atomics is currently constructing and will operate a Mass Production Layering Experiment (MPLX) System. The MPLX System will demonstrate the filling and layering of approximately 700 plastic spherical targets (4 mm diameter plastic shells) simultaneously in a fluidized bed as a batch process in less than a day. In addition the system will be able to characterize a single deuterium filled and layered cryogenically-cooled target. This paper details hardware being developed and tested for the building of this system.
