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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Nuclear Technology
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.
Bennet Krasch, Robin Größle, Daniel Kuntz, Sebastian Mirz
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 4 | May 2020 | Pages 481-487
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1718841
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A crucial part of the closed fuel cycle of future fusion power plants will be isotope separation, which takes place in a cryogenic distillation refraction column, where all six hydrogen isotopologues are separated due to their different vapor pressures at a given temperature. For monitoring and process controlling, the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe has investigated liquid hydrogen by infrared (IR) absorption spectroscopy and presented the first successful calibration for the inactive isotopologues. Now, the new Tritium Absorption InfraRed Spectroscopy 2 (T2ApIR) experiment, which is fully tritium compatible, is under construction and aims to provide a calibration for concentration measurements of all six hydrogen isotopologues in solid, liquid, and gaseous phases via not only IR absorption but also Raman spectroscopy. One major challenge of the new experiment so far has been the design of the cryostat, which had to fulfill diverse technical and safety requirements regarding tritium compatibility, cryogenics, and overpressure and the combination of optical components for Raman and IR spectroscopy.
