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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, Kevin T. Slattery, John C. Waldrop III, ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 54 | Number 3 | October 2008 | Pages 878-889
Technical Paper | Aries-Cs Special Issue | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1908
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the key factors that determine the competitiveness of any power plant is its capital cost. The premise for this study is that a more compact stellarator concept should result in a fusion power plant with lower capital costs that retains the attractive features of a stellarator with costs comparable to those of a tokamak power plant.One of the design innovations in the ARIES compact stellarator is a continuous monolithic coil structural shell conforming to the shape of the modular coils. This shell is structurally analyzed for electromagnetic and gravity forces to achieve tailored material thicknesses over the surface of the toroid. Fabricating such a complex structure with conventional means would be very challenging and costly.A new fabrication technology is "additive manufacturing" to create unique shapes directly from the computer-aided design definition file. Component size is not a limiting factor with this highly automated fabrication process. Multiple material deposition heads create the coil structure in a timely manner to near net shape. Heat treatment will remove residual stresses, followed by final machining of the internal coil grooves and attachment features. The fabrication cost was estimated to be less than one-third of the traditional fabrication methods.