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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.
S. Siriano, A. Tassone, G. Caruso
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 2 | February 2021 | Pages 144-158
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1858671
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Liquid metals offer unique properties and their use in a nuclear fusion reactor, both as confined flows and free-surface flow, is widely studied in the fusion community. The interaction between this conductive fluid and the tokamak magnetic fields leads to magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) phenomena that influence the flow features. To properly design components that employ liquid metals, it is necessary to accurately predict these features, and although the efforts have been made in development, a mature code specifically customized to simulate MHD flows is still unavailable. In this work, the general purpose computational fluid dynamics code ANSYS CFX 18.2 is validated for MHD free-surface thin-film flow with insulated walls up to and for several values of the characteristic width/thickness ratio, comparing the results with the theoretical relation available in the literature. For all the cases considered, the maximum integral error is found to be below 10%. Successively, the validated code is used to investigate the MHD flow in a chute with a characteristic film ratio equal to 0.1 and for . Uniform and nonuniform wall electrical conductivity cases are considered with the latter modeled by placing on the side walls and on the back wall localized regions with different conductivity. The electrical conductivity of the back wall is found to have a negligible effect on the global flow when the lateral wall is insulated, similarly to what is observed for the analogous bounded flow. Contrariwise, an electrically conductive lateral wall is found to enhance the free-surface jet and to modify the Hartmann layer structure.