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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.
D. H. Zhu, J. L. Chen, Z. J. Zhou, R. Yan, R. Ding
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 2 | October 2014 | Pages 337-342
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-738
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To investigate the influences of dispersed lanthanum oxide (La2O3) additive on the properties of a tungsten (W)-based plasma-facing material, ultrafine-grained W-1% La2O3 composite has been successfully fabricated using the resistance sintering under ultrahigh pressure method, which can suppress W grain growth during sintering processes. Its relative density, Vickers microhardness, microstructure, and thermal conductivity have been analyzed and compared with those of pure W. Moreover, its behaviors under fusion-related conditions, i.e., edge plasma loading in the HT-7 tokamak and transient heat flux simulated by a high-intensity pulsed ion beam, have been evaluated. It is shown that without the fine-grain strengthening effect of dispersed particles, the La2O3 additive as second-phase particles being dispersed in W-based plasma-facing material degrades the material resistance ability under plasma heat loading.
