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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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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.
Shigeru Kitabatake et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1280-1283
Environmental and Organically Bound Tritium | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12664
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Aomori Prefectural Government (Aomori Pref.) and Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited (JNFL) have been carrying out tritium monitoring of many kinds of environmental samples around the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant (RRP) as part of environmental radiation monitoring. Similarly, Aomori Pref. and Tohoku Electric Power Co., Inc. have been carrying out monitoring around the Higashidori Nuclear Power Station. Results which exceeded the background levels of environmental tritium were observed in water vapor, some seawater samples and some fish samples (measured as tissue free-water tritium(TFWT)) since the final commissioning test using actual spent nuclear fuels (Active Test) was started at the RRP on March 31 2006. Therefore, we examined causes for these results by considering the operational status of the RRP and meteorological and hydrographic conditions. The committed effective dose estimated by using the results for the effect of the RRP was far below the annual dose limit for the public (1 mSv).
