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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.
Susana Reyes, Jeffery F. Latkowski, Javier Sanz
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 37 | Number 3 | May 2000 | Pages 225-230
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST00-A136
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Radioactive afterheat is an important source term for the release of radionuclides in fusion systems under accident conditions. Heat transfer calculations are used to determine time-temperature histories in regions of interest, but the true source term needs to be the "effective afterheat," which considers the transport of penetrating gamma rays. Without consideration of photon transport, accident temperatures may be overestimated in some regions while being underestimated in others. The importance of this effect is demonstrated for a simple, one-dimensional problem. The significance of this effect depends strongly on the accident scenario being analyzed.