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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
Lester M. Waganer, Richard J. Peipert, Jr., Xueren R. Wang, Siegfried Malang, ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 54 | Number 3 | October 2008 | Pages 787-817
Technical Paper | Aries-Cs Special Issue | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1904
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The goal of the ARIES compact stellarator is to define and assess a stellarator-based fusion power plant to provide electrical power as competitively as possible by balancing performance, cost, and plant availability. The traditional stellarator concepts are as compact as possible to reduce the plant capital costs, which are driven by the power core volume, weight, and cost. Different coil configurations are defined and assessed, trading plasma performance, power core design, access between the coils, and overall capital cost. Maintenance options are assessed and the port maintenance of first-wall/blanket and divertor modules is selected as the most feasible approach. Maintenance access is very important because the plasma-facing components have a limited lifetime. The available port access areas between the coils determine the maximum module envelope. With the maintenance approach selected, the frequency of maintenance determined, and module size defined, features of the maintenance approach are developed to maximize the power plant availability. After the preliminary maintenance approach, details for the power core components and facilities are finalized and a maintenance assessment is developed by analyzing the nominal times to conduct the maintenance actions. It is estimated that the ARIES-CS plant availability could reasonably be in the range of 85%.