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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.
Takeo Nishitani, Satoshi Sato, Kentaro Ochiai, Chuzo Kutsukake, Shigeru Tanaka, Yuichi Abe, Chikara Konno
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 791-795
Technical Paper | Nuclear Analysis and Experiments | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1587
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Blanket neutronics experiments were conducted for the development of the water-cooled pebble bed type ITER Test Blanket Module (TBM) using the Fusion Neutronics Source (FNS). Slab mockup assemblies based on the water-cooled pebble bed ITER TBM including water panels and/or a breeder pebble layer were irradiated by 14 MeV neutrons. After the irradiation, the amount of tritium produced in the diagnostic Li2CO3 pellets or breeder pebbles is measured by liquid scintillation counting method. The C/E ratios for the tritium production rate in those experiments are within 1 ± 0.05. A plan of the neutronics test on ITER-TBM and the neutronic diagnostics in the module are discussed. Micro fission chambers and compact activation foil transfer systems to be embedded in TBM are proposed for the neutron flux and neutron spectrum measurements, respectively.
