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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.
A. Abhishek, M. Warrier, E. Rajendra Kumar
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 65 | Number 2 | March-April 2014 | Pages 222-228
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-655
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Understanding helium transport and clustering is important for full understanding of fusion material degradation due to neutron irradiation. Molecular dynamics simulations are carried out to study the clustering of He in FeCr alloy. The simulations are performed for He fractions from 0.1 to 0.4 in FeCr alloy at temperatures ranging from 300 to 800 K. It is observed that a minimum of five He atoms is required to form a stable cluster at temperatures in the range 700 to 800 K. An He5-(Fe/Cr)2-V2 complex is found to exist at 300 K. At higher temperatures, the cluster displaces the Fe and Cr atoms from their lattice sites, forming an He5-V complex. The constituent element of the displaced material is then found to migrate inside the system, depending upon the conditions prevailing there.