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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
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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.
M. Inutake, A. Ando, K. Hattori, T. Yagai, H. Tobari, Y. Kumagai, H. Miyazaki, S. Fujimura
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 1 | January 2003 | Pages 118-124
Propulsion | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A11963577
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A supersonic plasma is produced quasi-steadily by use of a magneto-plasma-dynamic arcjet (MPDA) in various shapes of an external magnetic field configuration. An ion acoustic Mach number Mi of the plasma flow is limited to be nearly unity in a uniform magnetic field configuration, while it increases up to almost 3 in a divergent magnetic nozzle configuration. Spatial variations of Mi is well predicted by an isentropic model for a compressible gas. The Mach number decreases in the far downstream region due to charge-exchange collisions between flowing ions and neutral atoms which are produced through surface-recombination on the end wall. Ion heating of the fast flowing plasma has been successfully demonstrated for the first time. This success is mainly due to the plasma density is high enough to reduce the penetration of neutral gases which cause the charge-exchange energy loss. It is found that an asymmetric RF wave with an azimuthal mode number m= ± 1 is most effective to heat the ions.
