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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.
Neill P. Taylor, Wolfgang Raskob
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 359-366
Technical Paper | The Technology of Fusion Energy - Experimental Devices and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1514
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Throughout the various phases of the ITER project, extensive safety analyses have been performed to ensure that potential hazards to the public, the environment, and personnel are minimized. This work, done before a location for ITER had been chosen, resulted in a very comprehensive assessment of ITER safety in terms of the impact at a "generic site". By making good use of the favourable safety and environmental characteristics of fusion, a very good outcome was achieved.Now that the Cadarache site, in southern France, has been selected for ITER construction, it is necessary to reanalyze the impact of postulated accidental releases of tritium and activated material, taking into account the specific conditions of the site. These include regulatory requirements on dose limits and on assumptions to be made in analyses, as well as local environmental factors such as weather conditions, population demographics, and local food production and consumption patterns.This paper discusses the impact on the ITER safety case of new dispersion and dose calculations for accidental releases, taking into account these site-specific conditions. These indicate that doses arising from the release masses calculated for the most challenging accident scenario in previous generic-site studies will meet the new dose limits by a very large margin.