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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.
Prachai Norajitra, Widodo Widjaja Basuki, Radmir Giniyatulin, Caroline Hernandez, Vladimir Kuznetsov, Igor V. Mazoul, Marianne Richou, Luigi Spatafora
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 4 | May 2015 | Pages 732-744
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-832
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A helium-cooled divertor concept for DEMO has been continuously developed over the past decade at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology within the framework of the former European Fusion Power Plant Conceptual Study. Over the years, research results and progress of the divertor development with numerous earnings representations have been continually reported. This paper first gives a retrospect of the past results achieved so far and then reports on recent progress of the divertor development. In the course of developing the conceptual design with the goal of reaching a divertor heat flux performance of 10 MW/m2, the He-cooled modular divertor with jet cooling (HEMJ) was selected in the early 2000s as the reference concept out of a series of conceptual design studies. For verification of the design principle, a combined high-heat-flux (HHF) test facility with helium loop was built in 2004 at the Efremov Institute for the divertor experiments under specified DEMO conditions. There, the cooling performance of the divertor finger with helium under the heat load of 10 MW/m2 was confirmed already at an early stage. In parallel, the HEMJ divertor design was successively improved in terms of its robustness and quality of production in order to achieve a long service life against thermocyclic loading. A breakthrough was achieved in 2010 when an optimized HEMJ cooling finger survived more than 1000 HHF cycles at 10 MW/m2 without damage. In the context of long-term planning for DEMO divertor development, research and development work on the development of larger divertor components has been started, particularly focusing on certain fabrication techniques covering, e.g., high-temperature brazing and mass production of the divertor components. Recent progress—a part of this paper—was achieved in the HHF experiment of the tungsten nine-finger module in Efremov, development of nondestructive testing methods for testing multifinger modules in collaboration with CEA, and a study on the integration of multifinger modules on the target plate.