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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.
José M. Balmisa, Micah D. Lowenthal, Ehud Greenspan, Javier Sanz, Nathan Stone
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 34 | Number 3 | November 1998 | Pages 964-968
Neutronics Experiments and Analysis (Poster Session) | doi.org/10.13182/FST98-A11963737
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new practical method has been developed for calculating neutron-activation inventories of target material in inertial fusion energy (IFE) reactors such as HYLIFE-II. It accounts for irradiation both in the target and in the internal blanket and for material circulation in and out of the primary loop. The continuous removal of target material in the real system is approximated by a batch extraction (BE). A single target is followed through its lifetime in the reactor using “transition matrices” for activation and decay which are generated by the ACAB code package. The inventory of all the isotopes of interest accumulating in the reactor is obtained by superimposing the contribution of single targets. The new BE model simulates, within minutes, the evolution of more than 150 isotopes over the 30-year reactor lifetime, explicitly accounting for the millions of neutron pulses experienced by a single target and summing the inventories of all the targets.