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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.
Guang-Hong Lu, Long Cheng, Kameel Arshad, Yue Yuan, Jun Wang, Shaoyang Qin, Ying Zhang, Kaigui Zhu, Guang-Nan Luo, Haishan Zhou, Bo Li, Jiefeng Wu, Bo Wang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 2 | February 2017 | Pages 177-186
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST16-115
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The linear plasma device Simulator for Tokamak Edge Plasma (STEP) has been constructed at Beihang University, Beijing, to study plasma-material interactions (PMIs) for fusion reactor applications. The device can produce versatile low-energy and high flux plasma in laboratory experiments and is highly cost-effective to replicate the fusion-relevant plasma environment to study PMI processes. The attractive feature of the device is its compact design with a main body dimension of 1.5 × 1.5 × 0.8 m3 including the plasma source, vacuum chamber, magnetic coils, and diagnostics. A longitudinal magnetic field of up to 0.26 T is used to confine the plasma onto the target in an ~1-m-long vacuum tube. It can produce a steady-state plasma of low impinging ion energy of <100 eV, ion flux up to 1022 m−2 · s−1, and fluence of >1026 m−2 per exposure. Various plasma species such as hydrogen, deuterium, helium, and nitrogen can be produced to manipulate PMI processes for different target grades. The STEP device provides an experimental platform to improve the understanding of PMIs, validate computational simulation results, and build a database of fusion material performance and lifetime.