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Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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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. H. Mills, B. Zhao, S. I. Abdel-Khalik, M. Yoda
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 541-545
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-116
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new helium (He) loop was used to study the helium-cooled modular divertor with multiple jets (HEMJ) at incident heat fluxes q″ ≤ 6.6 MW/m2 as part of the joint US-Japan effort on plasma-facing components evaluation by tritium plasma, heat, and neutron irradiation experiments (PHENIX). These studies were performed at prototypical pressures of 10 MPa and inlet temperatures ranging from 30 °C to 300 °C. The effect of varying the distance between the inner jets cartridge and the outer shell from 0.44 to 0.9 mm was also investigated.
The Nusselt number Nu results for two different tungsten-alloy test sections were in good agreement for q″ = 1.5−6.6 MW/m2. The experiments also suggest that the loss coefficient KL is essentially constant. These Nu and KL results were used to estimate the maximum heat flux q′′max that can be accommodated by the divertor under prototypical conditions and the coolant pumping power as a fraction of the incident thermal power β. The agreement over the broad range of experimental parameters studied suggests that these results at near-prototypical conditions can be extrapolated with reasonable confidence to the operating conditions expected for the HEMJ design.