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Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
Mingzhun Lei, Yuntao Song, Minyou Ye, Kun Lu, Kun Pei, Kun Xu, Shuling Xu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 4 | November 2015 | Pages 772-779
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-857
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) is a superconducting tokamak reactor proposed by the China National Integration Design Group. The aim is to develop China’s next-step fusion device. A helium-cooled ceramic breeder (HCCB) blanket concept has been put forward by the blanket integration design team of the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The present blanket configuration is based on the upper port dimension and maintenance scheme. The HCCB blanket comprises a U-shaped first wall, cap, breeder unit, middle plate, and back plate. The breeder unit includes a cooling plate, beryllium pebble bed, and lithium silicate pebble bed. The structure of the HCCB blanket concept is obviously different from the ITER HCCB test blanket module of China. The CFETR HCCB blanket will meet the requirements of CFETR long-pulse or steady-state operation with a duty cycle time greater than 0.3. The maintenance scheme of the blanket is introduced in this paper. Three-dimensional neutronic analysis results show that the tritium breeding ratio can satisfy the design requirement. Besides, the thermal-hydraulic behavior of the first wall has been studied using ANSYS CFX code.