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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.
John Sheffield, Stanley L. Milora
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 1 | July 2016 | Pages 14-35
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-157
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The original generic magnetic fusion reactor paper was published in 1986 for deuterium-tritium reactors. This update describes what has changed in 30 years. Notably, the construction of ITER is providing important benchmark numbers for technologies and costs. In addition, we use a more conservative neutron wall flux and fluence. But, these cost-increasing factors are offset by greater optimism on the thermal-electric conversion efficiency and potential availability. In addition, today’s inflation and interest rates are low, leading to a cost of money well below that used in the original study. The main examples show the cost of electricity (COE) as a function of aspect ratio and neutron flux to the first wall. The dependence of the COE on availability, thermoelectric efficiency, electrical power output, and the present day’s low interest rates is also discussed. Interestingly, at fixed aspect ratio there is a shallow minimum in the COE at neutron flux of 2.5 MW/m2. The possibility of operating with only a small COE penalty at even lower wall loadings (to 1.0 MW/m2 at larger plant size) and the possible use of niobium-titanium coils are also investigated. It should be emphasized that the variation in the COEs is important rather than their absolute values.