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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
Masaru Takagi, Robert Cook, Richard Stephens, Jane Gibson, Sally Paguio
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 38 | Number 1 | July 2000 | Pages 54-57
Technical Paper | Thirteenth Target Fabrication Specialists’ Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST00-A36116
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Poly(α-methylstyrene) (PαMS) mandrel precursors (a PαMS containing fluorobenzene solution surrounding a water core) are suspended in a salt-containing water solution during curing. The salt is necessary to suppress the growth of water drops in the curing oil phase (resulting in vacuoles in the dried mandrel). However the use of salts in this manner results in a chemical potential difference between the inner pure water droplets and the outer bath. This results in a loss of water from the inner water phase, shrinking the mandrel as it cures and potentially wrinkling its surface. We have quantified the degree of mandrel shrinkage and expansion as a function of the difference in salt concentration. Expansion is not proportional to concentration difference. It does not appear that osmotically driven expansion removes wrinkles; the large wrinkle amplitudes were seen with all salt concentrations.