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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
W. M. Stacey
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 1 | July 2007 | Pages 29-67
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1485
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The strong temperature dependence, over certain temperature ranges, of the radiation cooling rate of low-Z impurities, of the atomic physics cooling and particle source rates associated with recycling and fueling neutrals, of the ion-electron recombination particle loss rate, of the turbulent transport loss rate, and of the fusion alpha-particle heating rate have all been identified as "drivers" of thermal instabilities in the coupled plasma particle, momentum, and energy balances. This paper surveys the experimental observations of a number of abrupt transition phenomena in plasma operating conditions - i.e., density-limit disruptions, multifaceted asymmetric radiations from the edge (MARFEs), divertor MARFEs, detachment, in-out divertor heat flux asymmetries, H-L and L-H transitions, confinement, and pedestal deterioration - or anticipated in future reactors - i.e., power excursions - their theoretical interpretations in terms of thermal instabilities driven by the temperature dependence of various radiative and atomic physics cooling mechanisms, and a comparison of theoretical prediction with experimental observations. Also surveyed are theoretical predictions of thermal instabilities in the power balance driven by the strong positive temperature dependence of the fusion heating rate.