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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.
John W. Simpson was elected the 19th president of the American Nuclear Society (ANS). Simpson was a charter member of the Society and elevated to Fellow of ANS in 1958.
John Simpson was born on September 25, 1914. He was top executive and engineer for the Westinghouse Electric Corporation who played a major role in developing the nation’s first commercial nuclear power plant and its first nuclear-powered submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus.
John joined the Marines in 1933. Just as he was completing basic training, his application to attend the United States Naval Academy was accepted. He graduated from Annapolis in 1937. But in his last year at the academy, he developed near-sightedness and was denied a commission. Instead, he went to work as a junior engineer at the Westinghouse switchboard division in East Pittsburgh, Pa. There he met Rickover, the Navy’s contract officer on the switchboard project. At the same time, he pursued a master’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. He received the degree in 1941.
In 1946, he took a two-year leave of absence to work at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. There, with Rickover and a group of engineers and scientists, he helped draft plans for the first attempt at applying nuclear energy to the generation of electricity. He returned to Westinghouse in 1949 and was named assistant manager of engineering at the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in Pittsburgh. There, in addition to working on the Nautilus with Rickover, he helped design propulsion plants for the U.S.S. Long Beach and the U.S.S. Enterprise, the nation’s first nuclear surface ships, and for the U.S.S. George Washington, the first nuclear submarine that carried Polaris missiles.
In 1951, Westinghouse received a contract from the federal Atomic Energy Commission to build the first atomic electricity-generating plant, at Shippingport, Pa., and John became manager of the project. In the late 1950s, he organized the company’s astro-nuclear laboratory, which won the federal government’s first contract to develop a nuclear reactor for rocket propulsion. It was successfully tested, but funding was later diverted for other activities.
John was president of the Westinghouse Electric Power Systems Company from 1969 to 1977. He was awarded the Edison Medal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1971 for his contributions to electricity generation and naval and space propulsion. His citation reads: “The extent to which he influenced the transition from scientific discovery to practical application in all three areas is to a substantial degree responsible for the eminence of the United States in the atomic energy field today.”
John W. Simpson passed away on January 4, 2007.
Read Nuclear News from July 1969 for more on John Simpson.
Last modified November 24, 2020, 11:01am CST