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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.
Gen Chen, Yanping Zhao, Yuzhou Mao, Yuan Shuai, Xinjun Zhang, Chengming Qing
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 2 | February 2017 | Pages 144-149
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-228
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Ion cyclotron resonance frequency (ICRF) heating is one of the traditional auxiliary heating methods adopted in the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST). The radio-frequency (rf) source consisting of eight transmitters has been fabricated since 2012 and has a working frequency of 24 to 70 MHz. It has a maximum total power of ~12 MW. However, the power injection into plasma has been restricted by the variable antenna load, which is sensitive to the scrape-off-layer boundary condition and the gradient distribution of plasma density. Triple liquid stub tuners, which have been employed for ICRF impedance matching, cannot cope with such rapid variations because of the low response speed. In previous research, a 300-kW ferrite tuner (FT) was developed and tested, but it was not good enough to meet the requirements of real-time impedance matching. Research on a high-power fast-response FT with maximum power of 1.5 MW was carried out to achieve real-time tuning to trace the load variations of the antenna. The design parameters of the FT were determined according to the experimental data of the antenna load in EAST. The ferrite material, rf circuit, and magnet system of the FT were discussed to satisfy the design goals. The test results showed good performance of response time, differential phase shift, and insertion loss, which was extremely significant for the high-power, real-time operation of an impedance matching network based on FTs.