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Fusion Science and Technology
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.
M. Oyaidzu et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 1 | July-August 2005 | Pages 638-641
Technical Paper | Tritium Science and Technology - Materials Interaction and Permeation | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1006
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The annihilation behaviors of radiation defects in neutron-irradiated LiAlO2 were investigated by means of Electron Spin Resonance (ESR). It was found that the annihilation of radiation defects consisted of two processes, the fast and the slow processes. The activation energies of them were determined to be 0.14 ± 0.01 eV and 0.58 ± 0.01 eV, respectively. The F+-center was found to act as a trapping site of tritium by comparing its annihilation behavior with that of tritium release. Taking the results obtained in the present and the previous works in consideration, it can be said that the annihilation process of oxygen vacancies is of very important because tritium release from the bulk of a breeder starts just after the slow annealing process becomes dominant. Therefore, to understand the slow annihilation process of radiation defects is an important key to clarify the mechanism of tritium release from ceramic breeder materials.
