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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
Claudia Bogdan, Sebastian Brad, Horia Necula, Oleksandr Sirosh, Catalin Brill, Mihai Vijulie, Alin Lazar, Aleksandr Grafov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 3 | April-May 2024 | Pages 443-454
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2259238
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The following properties are needed to increase the efficiency of refrigeration, liquefaction, and cryogenic separation cycles: Heat exchangers must have high effectiveness doubled by high compactness; small temperature differences between incoming and outgoing flows must be ensured to increase efficiency; there must be a large heat transfer surface, relative to the volume of the heat exchanger, to minimize heat loss; there must be a high heat transfer rate to reduce the transfer area; there must be a small pressure drop to reduce compression costs; and there must be high reliability with minimal maintenance. All these properties are entirely fulfilled by the designed matrix heat exchangers (MHEs). This paper presents the results of the research program developed by the team of the Cryogenic Laboratory from INC-DTCI ICSI Ramnicu Valcea, which included procedural stages of the realization and preliminary results of the characterization of the MHE-type heat exchanger in a narrow range of values to achieve a proper solution for a heat exchanger to be used for cryogenic purposes, such as cooling the gas mixture at the entrance of a distillation column of hydrogen isotopes and running at low pressure (typically regimes of 0.5 to 2.0 bars) and flows. Within several experimental campaigns, different assembly and testing techniques of the matrix heat exchanger (MHE) prototype were performed to achieve numerical data for the temperature and pressure drops along the heat exchanger and to verify ANSYS Fluent numerical simulation results. The results showed that for the designed and tested MHE prototype, a temperature drop of up to almost 230 K can be obtained at the established parameters correlated with pressure losses within a few millibars (the maximum recorded pressure drop is 80 mbars), small dimensions (64 mm high), and accessible weight (up to 2000 g).