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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
M. Hirata et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 1 | January 2005 | Pages 215-217
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems for Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A642
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Significant effects of sheared transverse electric fields in plasmas on both turbulent fluctuations and drift waves are experimentally demonstrated with improvement in plasma confinement for the first time in the tandem mirror GAMMA 10. Here, electron-cyclotron heatings (ECH) for ion-confining potential formation are applied in association with a significant rise in the absolute value of the central-cell potential and the resulting formation of a strong shear of electric fields of the order of 10 kV/m2 in the radial direction of the plasma column (dEr/dr). The central-cell line density increases during ECH in association with decreasing fluctuations. Various fluctuation diagnostics, in particular, the frequency analyses of end-loss ion currents and central soft x-ray brightness, show the consistent features. This encourages the usefulness of potentials and radial electric-field shear for confinement improvements.