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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
Teppei Otsuka et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 1 | July-August 2005 | Pages 708-711
Technical Paper | Tritium Science and Technology - Properties, Reactions, and Applications | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1022
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Hydrogen distributions around non-metallic inclusions in steels are successfully characterized with high-resolution tritium autoradiography. The autoradiographs show that hydrogen accumulation characteristics around the inclusions depend on types of the inclusions. In the case of MnS, hydrogen was inhomogeneously distributed in the ferrite matrix surrounding the MnS inclusion, probably because hydrogen is trapped in defects formed around MnS. The inhomogeneous distribution of hydrogen may be originated from the asymmetric stress field produced by a contraction of the MnS phase in the heat treatment, i.e. the inhomogeneous volumetric change of MnS owing to its larger thermal expansion than that of the ferrite phase. In the case of Al2O3, hydrogen was intensely localized at boundary layers of the ferrite matrix surrounding the Al2O3 inclusion. This could be attributed to hydrogen trapping at defects introduced by a residual stress in the boundary layers of the ferrite matrix due to larger contraction of the ferrite phase than that of the Al2O3 phase on cooling. Similarly hydrogen was accumulated in the surrounding ferrite matrix but more widely distributed around Cr carbide probably because difference in the thermal expansion between the Cr carbide and ferrite phases is less than that between the Al2O3 and ferrite phases.