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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.
A. Perevezentsev, K. Watanabe, M. Matsuyama, Y. Torikai
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 3 | May 2002 | Pages 746-750
Decontamination and Waste | Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology Tsukuba, Japan November 12-16, 2001 | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A22686
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritium distribution in stainless steel type 316 exposed to hydrogen containing 32% of tritium at room and elevated temperatures was studied using thermal desorption, analysis of bremsstrahlung spectrums and acid etching techniques. All samples exhibit a large fraction of the overall tritium inventory concentrated in a thin sub-surface layer of ≈15µm thickness, where tritium concentration is by ≈2 order of magnitude larger than that in the bulk. Observed tritium depth profiles are in contradiction with a classical mechanism of hydrogen penetration to metals by atomic diffusion.