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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.
Jianqi Xi, Peng Zhang, Chaohui He, Mingjie Zheng, Hang Zang, Daxi Guo, Li Ma
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 235-244
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-740
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A molecular dynamics study has been performed to investigate the generation and evolution of damage states in irradiated β-SiC at high temperature. It is found that most of the C antisites (SiC) are created during the early collisional phase, while the Si antisites (CSi) are significantly produced during the thermal spike phase. A modified near-neighbor point defect density (NPDD) is introduced to study the spatial aggregation of different defects during the displacement cascades, and feature of defect clusters evolution is analyzed in details. The dominated types of vacancy clusters after the displacement cascades are two- and three-size chainlike ones. And the vacancy NPDD (V-NPDD) decreases as the recoil energy increases. Furthermore, after the thermal spike phase, there is an additional annealing process during which the interstitials and antisites turn into defect clusters, respectively.