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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.
Yu. Igitkhanov, B. Bazylev, I. Landman
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 245-249
Plasma-Material Interactions | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A18084
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the steady-state operation the life-time performance of functional and structural materials in fusion reactor DEMO will be limited by several processes such as a sputtering erosion, transient events and neutron irradiation. The design strategy is to determine the structure and coating thicknesses which maximize component lifetime against all lifetime limitations. The sputtering erosion of the first wall tungsten armor layer due to the plasma impact during the steady state DEMO operation is considered here. It is shown that for DEMO conditions the total sputtering erosion of W armor by the charge-exchange DT neutrals could at least reach~1mm during one year of steady-state operation.