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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.
Takashi Kato, Kunihiro Matsui, Susumu Shimamoto, Kazuhiko Nishida, Tadaaki Honda, Kazuya Hamada, Hiroshi Tsuji, Neil Michel, Kiyoshi Yoshida
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 30 | Number 3 | December 1996 | Pages 1253-1257
Fusion Magnet Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A11963120
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the safety analysis for superconducting magnet system in International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) was carried out. The ITER cryostat will hold many superconducting magnets, such as twenty of toroidal field coils, a central solenoid coil, and seven poloidal coils. Loss of vacuum of the cryostat was considered as the worst assumption and the safety analysis of the magnets was examined when the assumption would be occurred. Accordingly, the loss of vacuum will cause the loss of thermal shield vacuum for the magnets and then a large heat transfer will be generated in the cryostat The magnet pressure and temperature will rise, bringing the magnets to quench. Such behavior was simulated by using a developed computer-aided calculation code. As a result of the calculation, a catastrophic phenomenon doesn't appear in the assumption. It is observed that a quasi-stable state, where the magnet temperature is kept to be less than 7 K, is maintained for more than 600 seconds. Thus, the magnet current can be slowly discharged like as the ordinal operation without magnet quench even in such worst assumption due to a large volume of the cryostat.