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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. Lipa, J. Schlosser, F. Escourbiac
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 3 | October 2009 | Pages 1124-1149
Technical Papers | Tore Supra Special Issue | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9171
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To fulfill the Tore Supra mission (the realization and study of high-performance long-duration discharges), the development of reliable actively cooled plasma-facing components is mandatory. This was foreseen from the beginning of Tore Supra, and since 1985, the Tore Supra team has been involved in the development and fabrication of actively cooled plasma-facing components. The initial configuration of the machine in 1988 included a 12 m2 inner first wall made of stainless steel tubes armoured with brazed graphite, outer water-cooled stainless steel panels, and modular pump limiters. This configuration, using the inner wall as limiter, allowed 20- to 30-s-duration plasma discharges to be performed. Further progress required the development of a more reliable brazing technique and a limiter support system mechanically independent of the vacuum vessel. A new configuration (Composants Internes et Limiteur project), using a completely new concept of high-heat-flux components (including notably a braze-free bond between carbon-fiber composite tiles and copper heat sink), was therefore launched in 1997. With this new configuration, discharges up to 6 min with 1 GJ of injected and removed power were achieved in 2003.