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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.
A. Martin et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 65-69
Divertor and High Heat Flux Components | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8877
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The main function of the ITER divertor system is to exhaust the major part of the alpha particle power as well as helium and impurities from the plasma. In order to fulfil these functions a divertor, a cooling system, a high vacuum pumping system , diagnostics and a gas injection system need to be integrated into the lower part of the vacuum vessel and into the divertor level ports. All components need to be assembled/disassembled using RH tools. The integration of all these systems has been undertaken to ensure that the overall functionality of the divertor is preserved, while fulfilling the requirements of each specific system.