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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.
R. R. Paguio, D. J. Jasion, K. M. Saito, M. E. Schoff, R. M. Jimenez, J. F. Hund, M. P. Farrell
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | March-April 2013 | Pages 268-273
Technical Paper | Selected papers from 20th Target Fabrication Meeting, May 20-24, 2012, Santa Fe, NM, Guest Editor: Robert C. Cook | doi.org/10.13182/FST63-2-268
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Deuterated polyethylene films as thin as 50 m have been produced using a four-post heated press method. These films are then cut into the desired shape (foil) and are used for the magnetic recoil spectrometer (MRS). The MRS is a diagnostic tool for inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) and at the OMEGA Laser Facility at the University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics. The films produced by this method are more uniform and have fewer defects than foils prepared by previous methods. Whereas traditional films had a thickness limitation of 100 m, this new heat pressing method allows the fabrication of 50-m films, which is the desired thickness for MRS foils. The foils produced and characterized by General Atomics have decreased the neutron measurement uncertainty of the MRS instrument by a factor of 2 compared to the previous foils. This work has also been extended to fabricate thin polymer films and films with sinusoidal patterns from other polymeric materials for ICF experiments. This paper will discuss the heat pressing technique used in the fabrication of these films for the NIF and OMEGA MRS as well as other patterned and flat polymer films. The morphology of these foils and the advantages that they provide will also be discussed.