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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
R. Fischer, A. Bock, M. Dunne, J. C. Fuchs, L. Giannone, K. Lackner, P. J. McCarthy, E. Poli, R. Preuss, M. Rampp, M. Schubert, J. Stober, W. Suttrop, G. Tardini, M. Weiland, ASDEX Upgrade Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 69 | Number 2 | April 2016 | Pages 526-536
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-185
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A tokamak equilibrium reconstruction can benefit much from internal measurements of the current distribution. If lacking robust internal measurements, the reconstruction will be ill posed in the plasma core, not allowing for a sensible estimation of the current distribution. Such deficiencies can be compensated for by modeling the current distribution evolution by employing the current diffusion equation between successive equilibria. A scheme for the coupling of the predictive current diffusion equation with the equilibrium reconstruction from an inverse Grad-Shafranov equilibrium solver minimizing a least-squares criterion on measured and modeled data is proposed. The scheme is intended for routine equilibrium analysis shortly after the discharge where all diagnostic data are available. Results from the implementation at ASDEX Upgrade are shown, applied to a reversed-shear plasma with counter-current electron cyclotron current drive and to the start-up phase of the plasma. Results are compared to TRANSP calculations.