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The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
W. J. Chen, D. L. Yu, L. W. Yan, B. S. Yuan, X. X. He, L. Liu, Y. L. Wei, N. Zhang, X. F. He, H. Wu, Z. B. Shi, Y. Liu, Q. W. Yang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 1 | January 2020 | Pages 37-44
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1629251
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to reconstruct the plasma current density, the Current Profile Fitting (CPF) code has been successfully developed on the HL-2A tokamak. A seven-channel motional Stark effect (MSE) diagnostic based on dual photoelastic modulators is installed to measure the pitch angle of the magnetic field, which can be used as an internal magnetic field constraint for the CPF code. Recently, the MSE polarimeter was upgraded with a real-time wavelength matching system to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. The magnetic field angle (γpitch) with a temporal resolution of 10 ms can be provided. In the CPF code, the plasma current density is described as a polynomial, and the Least-Squares method is used to determine the coefficients of the polynomial. The Finite Difference method and the Strongly Implicit Procedure method are used to solve the Grad-Shafranov equation. The code operation is stable. With the improved-quality MSE data, the CPF calculation result of shot 30782 suggests that the safety factor q profile is monotonic. The minimum q value is less than 1 on-axis during sawtooth oscillations in shot 30782. And, the position of the q = 1 surface is consistent with the sawtooth inversion radius measured by electron cyclotron emission and soft X-ray diagnostics.
