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Integrating Waste Management for Advanced Reactors: The Universal Canister System and Project UPWARDS
When the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy launched the Optimizing Nuclear Waste and Advanced Reactor Disposal Systems (ONWARDS) program in 2022, it posed a challenge that the nuclear industry had never seriously confronted before: how to design waste management solutions that anticipate the coming shift to advanced reactors and not merely retrofit existing systems built for an older generation of technology. The program’s objectives were ambitious—reduce disposal footprint, enable scalable pathways for unfamiliar waste streams, and build the technical foundations for future disposal—yet also tightly grounded in the realities of emerging nuclear fuel cycles. For the nuclear community, this was a timely call. Advanced reactors were accelerating toward deployment, but the waste management systems needed to support them had not kept pace.
Ehab Hassan, C. E. Kessel, J. M. Park, W. R. Elwasif, R. E. Whitfield, K. Kim, P. B. Snyder, D. B. Batchelor, D. E. Bernholdt, M. R. Cianciosa, D. L. Green, K. J. H. Law
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 3 | April 2023 | Pages 189-212
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2145826
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Several configurations for the core and pedestal plasma are examined for a predefined tokamak design by implementing multiple heating/current drive (H/CD) sources to achieve an optimum configuration of high fusion power in a noninductive operation while maintaining an ideally magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) stable core plasma using the IPS-FASTRAN framework. IPS-FASTRAN is a component-based lightweight coupled simulation framework that is used to simulate magnetically confined plasma by integrating a set of high-fidelity codes to construct the plasma equilibrium (EFIT, TOQ, and CHEASE), calculate the turbulent heat and particle transport fluxes (TGLF), model various H/CD systems (TORIC, TORAY, GENRAY, and NUBEAM), model the pedestal pressure and width (EPED), and estimate the ideal MHD stability (DCON). The TGLF core transport model and EPED pedestal model are used to self-consistently predict plasma profiles consistent with ideal MHD stability and H/CD (and bootstrap) current sources. In order to evaluate the achievable and sustainable plasma beta, varying configurations are produced ranging from the no-wall stability to with-wall stability regimes, simultaneously subject to the self-consistent TGLF, EPED, and H/CD source profile predictions that optimize configuration performance. The pedestal density, plasma current, and total injected power are scanned to explore their impact on the target plasma configuration, fusion power, and confinement quality. A set of fully noninductive scenarios are achieved by employing ion-cyclotron, neutral beam injection, helicon, and lower-hybrid H/CDs to provide a broad profile for the total current drive in the core region for a predefined tokamak design. These noninductive scenarios are characterized by high fusion gain (Q ~ 4) and power (Pfus ~ 600 MW), optimum confinement quality (H98 ~ 1.1), and high bootstrap current fraction (fBS ~ 0.7) for Greenwald fraction below unity. The broad current profile configurations identified are stable to low-n kink modes either because the normalized pressure β is below the no-wall limit or a wall is present.
