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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.
Jin-Yang Li, Sheng-Miao Guo, Long Gu, You-Peng Zhang, Hu-Shan Xu, Da-Wei Wang, Rui Yu, Guan Wang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 6 | August 2021 | Pages 409-418
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1921363
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The stellarator plasma device has been widely studied as one of the candidate solutions paralleling the ITER project, and its coupling with a fission blanket can bring benefits promoting the development of fusion technology with stable energy production simultaneously. However, the neutronics optimization design for the stellarator-type Fusion-Fission Hybrid Reactor (FFHR) is extremely complex since the helical structure with a large amount of spline curved surfaces cannot be exactly described in most of the Monte Carlo simulation processes, and the preliminary design stage has also been a time-consuming and error-prone task with the requirements frequently changing. In this context, the mesh-oriented optimized method has been considered for the parametric modeling analysis in order to get the ideal structure without redundant topologic information, and the corresponding conversion process from computer-aided design (CAD) to Monte Carlo simulation has been fulfilled by the CAD-PSFO code. Moreover, the liquid type of thorium-uranium fuels has been selected as the solutes dissolve in the molten salt blanket with its multilayer structure, where the burnup feature and neutronics properties have been analyzed and explained with the help of the OMCB code. The stellarator-type FFHR has been designed as a compact multifunctional device that can incinerate plutonium and transmute the minor actinide isotopes with tritium self-sufficiency and the high-energy multiplication factor.