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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.
J. T. Bousquet, J. F. Hund, D. T. Goodin, N. B. Alexander
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 4 | May 2009 | Pages 446-449
Technical Paper | Eighteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST55-446
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The horizontal rotary glow discharge polymer (GDP) coater is being developed to help increase the production rate of inertial confinement fusion targets and to meet the very high production rates needed for inertial fusion energy targets. The coater is used to put a conformal GDP gas retention coating on top of foam shell targets. A number of alterations to the design and operation of the horizontal rotary GDP coater are discussed. Compared to previous iterations of the horizontal coater, the changes have resulted in improving the yield of gas retentive targets with thinner coatings and increasing the coating rate, smoothness, and uniformity. The number of targets that can be coated at once has increased from tens to hundreds, or even thousands. The alterations include changing the coating tube configuration; adjusting the coating pressures; and altering the radio-frequency power, gas flow rates, and tube rotation rates. Methods to further improve the coater are also discussed.