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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.
James P. Blanchard, Carl J. Martin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 585-590
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A749
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The first wall of a laser fusion chamber will experience high heat loads pulsed at 5-10 Hz with pulse widths on the order of a few microseconds. This poses a challenging problem for dry wall designs, as the wall will be susceptible to a variety of failure modes. The primary design concept of the High Average Power Laser (HAPL) project is a ferritic steel first wall coated with tungsten armor. Due to the extreme heat loads, the armor will experience high temperatures, extensive yielding, and surface cracking. In order to evaluate the ability of this design to provide a suitable lifetime, a series of experiments to simulate chamber conditions using ions, x-rays, infrared heating, and lasers is under way. These experimental efforts have been coupled with numerical modeling to help determine likely failure modes and establish design criteria for chambers. This paper compares models for the thermomechanical effects seen in the tests to those expected in a full power chamber, in order to assess the ability of the tests to mimic the actual chamber performance. The tests are found to have some limitations, but they still offer excellent approximations of the true behavior.