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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.
S. Meschini, M. Zucchetti, Enrico Pagliuca
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 7 | November 2021 | Pages 784-790
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1921461
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As a first step to exploring the possibilities of D-3He plasmas, a deuterium-tritium burning plasma experiment at high field and plasma densities, which can be much closer to the required parameters than present-day experiments, is particularly attractive. Compact high-field experiments were the first to be proposed in order to achieve fusion ignition conditions based on existing technology and the known properties of high-density plasmas. In previous studies, a feasibility study of a high-field D-3He experiment of larger dimensions and higher fusion power than Ignitor, but based on Ignitor technologies, was brought to the proposed Candor fusion experiment. Unlike Ignitor, Candor would operate with values of poloidal beta around unity and the central part of the plasma column in the second stability region. The toroidal field coils are divided into two sets of coils, and the central solenoid (air core transformer) is placed between them in the inboard part. In this paper, a revised design of Candor is proposed, based on the new technologies. This tokamak is capable of reaching D-3He ignition on the basis of existing technologies and knowledge of plasma, without any optimistic extrapolation.