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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.
Akito Ipponsugi, Kazunari Katayama, Taku Matsumoto, Shogo Iwata, Makoto Oya, Youji Someya
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 3 | April-May 2024 | Pages 253-259
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2271228
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Several fusion plants plan to utilize two high-temperature and high-pressurized water coolant systems. Because of the high hydrogen-isotope mobility in high-temperature metal, tritium will inevitably transfer from the plasma side to the secondary coolant through the primary coolant. From the viewpoints of fuel control, tritium safety, and social acceptance, it is compulsory to investigate the tritium concentration dependence of permeation phenomena experimentally. Therefore, this study conducted a protium permeation experiment instead of tritium, which mocked the situation where the tritium concentration in the primary loop was extremely high. Considering the results in the previous tritium permeation research by the present authors, the tritium permeation behavior was likely proportional to the first power of the tritium concentration. Then, based on these experiments and references regarding the tritium permeation rate and water detritiation system (WDS) design, tritium concentration was computed in both loops. In this calculation condition, the primary and secondary loops reached about 0.4 TBq/kg and 167 MBq/kg during 3-year operations, respectively. Also, it was found that the required feed rate to keep the tritium concentration at 1 TBq/kg was 46.5 kg/h, which is less than the existing WDS specification.