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Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
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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.
Heinrich Hora, George H. Miley, Jak C. Kelly, Giovanna Salvaggi, Antonio Tate, Frederick Osman, Reynaldo Castillo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 36 | Number 3 | November 1999 | Pages 331-336
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST99-A114
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The proton reactions in host metals like palladium, nickel, or titanium generate elements up to a proton number Z = 82 (lead), where the generation probability follows a kind of Boltzmann distribution. This is very similar to the standard abundance distribution of the elements in the universe for heavy elements. The analogy leads to a relation to the magic numbers of the nuclear shell model, to its alternative (more general) foundation on the Bagge series contrary to the spin model of Jensen and Goeppert-Mayer, and to new large magic numbers in agreement with Greiner et al.'s results on superheavy elements.
