ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2024
Nuclear Technology
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.
A. Bruschi, W. Bin, S. Cirant, F. Gandini, V. Mellera, V. Muzzini
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 1 | January 2008 | Pages 62-68
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Electron Cyclotron Wave Physics, Technology, and Applications - Part 2 | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1653
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Beam absorbers play an important role both in electron cyclotron heating systems at high power and in millimeter-wave diagnostics that need a low level of stray or reflected power. In the first case short- and long-pulse loads are used, whose back-reflection can be kept within a few percent with proper techniques. In the second case, absorbers or scramblers are envisaged, to be put in hostile environments. At Istituto di Fisica del Plasma in Milan, a number of calorimetric loads have been developed, adopting several techniques for overall reflectivity reduction, which are suitable for beam sinking with calorimetric capability. They achieve a low overall reflectivity and high-power capability by a properly chosen power distribution in the absorbing wall provided by a dispersing mirror, by a smooth geometrical shape, by heat-resistant absorbing coatings of optimized thickness, and by accurate trapping of most of the escaping radiation with preload structures. Fundamental, when it becomes impossible to diffuse the incoming beam by the mirror alone, mostly because of side lobes at large angles, is the use of a newly developed phase-scrambling surface presented in this paper. It provides the necessary spreading, complementing all the other techniques into a set that can be helpful in designing millimeter-wave systems and diagnostics, in order to reduce spurious or unwanted signals.