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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.
John P. Holdren, Steve Fetter
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 3 | November 1983 | Pages 599-619
Special Section Contents | Radioactivation of Fusion Structures | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22810
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Comparison of accident-hazard potentials associated with neutron-activation products in fusion reactors of various designs and structural materials suffers from a number of shortcomings in the readily available hazard-index data. Neither inventories of curies nor biological hazard potentials (BHPs) are satisfactory indices of hazard even if consistently computed, and between-study inconsistencies in neutronics packages and BHP calculations further obscure the meaning of comparisons based on these measures. We present here the results of internally consistent calculations of radioactive inventories, BHPs, and off-site dose potentials associated with the first walls of nine reactor-design/first-wall-material combinations. A recent mirror-reactor design reduces off-site dose potentials by a factor of 2 compared to a muchstudied early tokamak, for a given first-wall material. Holding design fixed, HT-9 ferritic steel offers a factor of 2 reduction in dose potential compared to Type 316 stainless steel. By the dose-potential measure, molybdenum is the worst of the materials investigated and silicon carbide is by jar the best. Hazards in realizable accidents depend not only on the hypothetical dose potentials, as calculated here, but also on the actual release fractions of first-wall (or other activated) material. Review of the theoretical and experimental evidence bearing on release fractions suggests that, for most candidate materials, high release fractions from designs containing liquid lithium cannot yet be convincingly ruled out.