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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.
D. S. Lee, S. A. Musa, S. I. Abdel-Khalik, M. Yoda
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 8 | November 2019 | Pages 873-878
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1593008
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Over the last decade, a number of studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology (GT) have evaluated the thermal hydraulics of the design of the helium-cooled modular divertor with multiple jets (HEMJ) originally developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Using the GT helium loop, a test section of a single HEMJ finger heated by a radio-frequency (rf) induction heater was studied at near prototypical condition at pressures of ~10 MPa, maximum mass flow rates of 8 g/s, and maximum helium inlet temperatures Ti of 425°C. The area-averaged cooled surface temperature was estimated from embedded thermocouple measurements. This, together with the average incident heat flux , was used to determine the average heat transfer coefficient and the corresponding Nusselt number over the cooled surface. The normalized pressure loss coefficient KL was determined from the pressure drop measured across the test section.
The helium loop was modified last year by enclosing the test section and heater within an argon-filled stainless steel chamber to minimize oxidation of the tungsten-alloy test section. Initial results, when extrapolated to prototypical conditions, suggested that was about 20% higher than our previous results. However, the maximum heat flux for these results was less than 3 MW/m2 due to rf coupling with the steel chamber walls. The chamber was then recently upgraded to a glass–stainless steel enclosure with modified feedthroughs for the induction heater connections to minimize this coupling. With this upgrade, a maximum incident heat flux = 8.1 MW/m2 was achieved. This work presents experimental estimates and correlations for and KL at higher heat fluxes. These results provide greater confidence when estimating the maximum heat flux that can be accommodated by the HEMJ at fully prototypical conditions.
Finally, preliminary metrology results for the test section used to experimentally study the simplified flat design variant of the HEMJ are presented as part of an effort to resolve recently reported discrepancies between experimentally estimated and numerically simulated