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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.
Edgard Gnansounou, Denis Bednyagin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 388-393
Technical Paper | The Technology of Fusion Energy - Experimental Devices and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1518
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper examines the global potential for deployment of fusion power through elaboration of multi-regional long-term electricity market scenarios for the time horizon 2100. The probabilistic simulation dynamic programming model PLANELEC-Pro was applied in order to determine the expansion plans of the power generation systems in different world regions that adequately meet the projected electricity demand at minimum cost given the quality-of-service and CO2 emissions constraints. It was found that the deployment of total 330-950 GWe of fusion power world-wide could allow for reducing 1.8-4.3 % of global CO2 emissions from electricity generation, while entailing a slight increase of levelized system electricity cost (by approx. 0.1-0.4 [euro]cents/kWh). By the end of century, the estimated share of fusion in regional electricity mixes varies from 1.5 to 23% depending on the region. It is concluded that economic analysis of fusion technology should be complemented with the evaluation of the whole fusion RTD program in terms of social rate of return taking into account its external "spillover" benefits.