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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.
E. Clark, A. Lumsdaine, K. Ekici, A. Ruggles
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 3 | October 2017 | Pages 278-284
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1333823
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High heat flux thermal management is an important challenge for upcoming nuclear fusion and plasma physics experiments. The plasma facing components (PFCs) in devices such as ITER or Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) will be subjected to extreme heat loads on the order of 10–20 MW/m2 in the divertor region. The heat dissipation issue will become critical in this next generation of experiments, and active cooling will be necessary. The current state-of-the-art water cooled technologies can accommodate extreme heat fluxes and often utilize passive heat transfer enhancement techniques, such as swirl flow, to decrease the thermal loading on PFCs. Swirling flow is commonly induced with a twisted tape that is inserted into a circular tube. Twisted tape devices are planned for use in both W7-X and ITER. Computational modeling was performed to investigate the thermal-hydraulic performance for single-phase, turbulent flow of water through a twisted tape device. This study exploited the advantage of computational simulations by analyzing local flow information. It was shown that points of low wall shear stress corresponded to locations of low heat transfer coefficient and high surface temperatures. Thus, decreased wall shear stress could be an indicator for early burnout in twisted tape geometries. This analysis was the first step towards informing the design of twisted tape devices utilized in PFCs.