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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.
Neil Mitchell, Denis Bessette, Hirobumi Fujieda, Yuri Gribov, Cees Jong, Fabrice Simon
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 676-684
ITER | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8987
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ITER magnet system, particularly the Poloidal Field Coils (PFC) and Central Solenoid Coils (CSC), was originally designed to drive, confine and stabilise a set of plasmas about a baseline of a reference 15MA 400s inductive burn, with capability for inductive short burn at currents up to 17MA and 10MA non-inductive plasmas depending on the plasma parameters that can be achieved.Recent assessments of experimental data and improved plasma modelling have identified some constraints in the 2001 design that may limit the range of plasmas that can be generated in ITER. The constraints are a mixture of coil superconducting performance, structural and electrical limits, and concern both the accuracy of the formation of the plasma configuration (including the position of the separatrix lines in the divertor) and the stabilisation of the plasma position.