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WIPP: Lessons in transportation safety
As part of a future consent-based approach by the federal government to site new deep geologic repositories for nuclear waste, local communities and states that are considering hosting such facilities are sure to have many questions. Currently, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is the only example of such a repository in operation, and it offers the opportunity for state and local officials to visit and judge for themselves the risks and benefits of hosting a similar facility. But its history can also provide lessons for these officials, particularly the political process leading up to the opening of WIPP, the safety of WIPP operations and transportation of waste from generator facilities to the site, and the economic impacts the project has had on the local area of Carlsbad, as well as the rest of the state of New Mexico.
William J. Carmack, Galen R. Smolik, Robert A. Anderl, Robert J. Pawelko, Patricia B. Hembree
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 34 | Number 3 | November 1998 | Pages 604-608
Safety and Environment (Poster Session) | doi.org/10.13182/FST98-A11963680
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The INEEL has analyzed a variety of dust samples from operating experimental tokamaks: General Atomics' DIII-D, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Alcator CMOD, and Princeton's TFTR. These dust samples were collected and analyzed because of the importance of dust to the safety of future fusion power plants and ITER. The dust may contain tritium, be activated, be chemically toxic, and chemically reactive. The INEEL has carried out numerous characterization procedures on the samples yielding information useful both to tokamak designers and to safety researchers. Two different methods were used for particle characterization: optical microscopy (count based) and laser based volumetric diffraction (mass based). Surface area of the dust samples was measured using Brunauer, Emmett, and Teller, BET1, a gas adsorption technique.
The purpose of this paper is to present the correlation between our particle size measurements and our surface area measurements for tokamak dust.