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Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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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.
M. Yamauchi, T. Nishitani, S. Nishio, J. Hori, H. Kawasaki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 781-785
Technical Paper | Nuclear Analysis and Experiments | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1585
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Low activation material is one of the important factors for constructing high power fusion reactors in future. Unexpected activation, however, may be produced through sequential reactions due to charged particles created by primary neutron reactions. In the present work, the effect of the sequential activation reaction was studied for candidate low activation materials of a fusion demo-reactor. The calculations were conducted by the ACT4 code developed in JAEA for the activation analysis of fusion reactor designs and revised for dealing with the sequential activation reactions. The results say that the real dose rate around vanadium alloy becomes larger after the cooling for 3 years by considering the reaction. Although metal hydrate is regarded as an excellent low activation shield material, the reactions due to recoil protons are influential and the dose rate around vanadium hydrate is several orders of magnitude larger than the value calculated without the sequential process after 2 weeks cooling. In case of liquid breeders, the effect of sequential reactions is popularly observed and it affects the breeder reprocessing and the shield design of circulation loop.