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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.
Guido Van Oost
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 2 | February 2008 | Pages 356-366
Technical Paper | Anomalous Transport | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1721
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The importance of radial (i.e. perpendicular to the magnetic surface) electric fields was already recognised early in the research on controlled thermonuclear fusion. An initial description of electric field effects in toroidal confinement was given by Budker. Such a configuration with combined magnetic and electric confinement ("magnetoelectric confinement", where the electric field provides a toroidal equilibrium configuration without rotational transform) was studied by Stix, who suggested that a reactor-grade plasma under magnetoelectric confinement (electric fields of order 1 MV/cm) may reach a quasi-steady-state with ambipolar loss of electrons and some suprathermal ions (e.g. 3.5 MeV -particles). Experiments such as on the Electric Field Bumpy Torus EFBT provided quite favourable scaling for particle confinement. The possible importance of radial electric fields for transport was in the past repeatedly established. Since the early days the plasma potential has been measured in tokamaks such as ST, TM-4 and ISX-B, but because no significant effects of the radial electric field Er on plasma transport were observed under the machine conditions at that time, no further research was conducted in tokamaks.