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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.
Jason Wilson, James Becnel, David Demange, Bernice Rogers
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 8 | November 2019 | Pages 794-801
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1642089
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ITER fuel cycle is composed of a tokamak and several systems that will support the preparation of fuel, the handling of exhaust gases, and the recycle of unused fuel back to the tokamak. Deuterium and tritium (DT) isotopes are supplied to the tokamak. A key need for such separations arises from the fact that, of the DT fed to the ITER tokamak, only a small fraction burns. The unburned DT exits the tokamak along with impurity gases. The impurities are a rather complicated mixture including helium ash, non-DT gases injected into the tokamak, species originating from chemical reactions, and species originating from nuclear reactions. Exhaust gases from the torus are collected by pumps, which move the exhaust material to the tokamak exhaust process (TEP) system. The TEP system performs chemical separations on ITER fuel cycle process streams. The TEP recovers hydrogen isotopes from impurities such as argon, nitrogen, water, ammonia, and hydrocarbons. The TEP sends the hydrogen isotopes for subsequent processing to the isotope separation system or the storage and delivery system. At the same time, an impurity gas stream of extremely low tritium content (less than 8.88 TBq of tritium per day) is sent to the detritiation system. Since the TEP system completed conceptual design in 2010, the overall ITER design has advanced on a number of fronts. These advancements have affected the interfacing systems and operational scenarios that could have affected the design of the TEP system. The interfacing and operational changes were examined and new performance requirements for the TEP were determined. The TEP design was evaluated to determine if the design was flexible and robust enough to meet the performance and discharge requirements.