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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.
L. El-Guebaly, M. Zucchetti
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 484-491
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-952
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The importance of handling the sizable mildly radioactive materials that fusion generates received more attention in recent years. Disposing such sizable radwaste in geologic repositories is not a viable option. We suggest changing what is now a costly waste disposal concern for fusion energy into a valued commodity through the further development of the recycling and clearance approaches. This paper reports the outcome of two recent activities that identified the challenges of handling the radioactive materials of ARIES-ACT-2 power plant along with the required design changes and R&D programs that make the recycling/clearance approach a reality, and the development of a new detritiation code that predicts the efficiency of tritium recovery from metallic materials – an essential process before recycling.