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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.
B. K. Shukla
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 65 | Number 1 | January 2014 | Pages 145-153
Lecture | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-647
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The 82.6 GHz/200 kW and 42 GHz/500 kW electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) systems will be used in Tokamak SST-1 to carry out preionization and start-up experiments at 3.0- and 1.5-T operation. The 82.6-GHz gyrotron system has been tested for continuous waves (1000-s duration) using a conventional high-voltage power supply and for pulsed operation (200 kW for 1 s) using a regulated high-voltage power supply. The 42-GHz ECRH system is a pulsed system (500 ms), which will be used to carry out preionization and start-up experiments at 1.5 T (fundamental harmonic) on SST-1 and at 0.75 T (second harmonic) on Tokamak Aditya. The circular corrugated waveguide-based transmission line system contains two waveguide switches: one to test the gyrotron on a dummy load or the tokamak and the second switch to launch the ECRH power, either in SST-1 or in Aditya. The 42-GHz system has been tested on a dummy load, and the gyrotron delivers 500-kW power at beam voltage ∼49 kV and beam current ∼18 A. The output of the gyrotron is Gaussian (TEM00 mode) with mode purity >99%. The system is commissioned on both tokamaks (SST-1 and Aditya) to launch power in any tokamak.