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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.
Xiaosong Zhou, Shuming Peng, Xinggui Long, Shunzhong Luo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 905-909
Tritium Storage | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12563
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Helium release from titanium tritide films at room temperature have been studied. The evolution of lattice defects in long-aged titanium tritide films is also investigated by X-ray diffraction (XRD) over a period of about 1600 days (>4 years). And the thermal desorption (TD) has been used to investigate the 3He release from titanium tritide film with 3He/Ti atom ratio from 0.006 to 0.325. Results of XRD, TD and helium release were synthesized. A continuum-scale evolutionary model of helium for aging titanium tritide film is described which accounts for major features of the tritide experiment data. The combined stress-assisted-block loop punching growth for random bubble arrays and an average ligament stress criterion predicts an onset of inter-bubble fracture in good agreement with the He/Ti ratio observed for rapid He release.