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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.
M. Dalle Donne, A. Goraieb, G. Piazza, F. Scaffidi-Argentina
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 38 | Number 3 | November 2000 | Pages 310-319
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Beryllium Technology for Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST00-A36144
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For the next generation fusion reactors with a ceramic breeder blanket the use, as a neutron multiplier, of either a binary bed of large (≈ 2 mm) and small (≈ 0.1–0.2 mm) beryllium pebbles or a single size bed made of 1 mm or 2 mm pebbles is foreseen. The heat transfer parameters of such a binary pebble bed, namely the thermal conductivity and the heat transfer coefficient to the containing wall, have been investigated previously in the experimental device PEHTRA available at FZK. The experiments allowed to measure the effect of the bed temperature and of constraint exerted by the containing walls. The constraint is defined by the bed interference, i.e. the difference in the radial expansion between bed and the constraining walls related to the bed thickness (Δℓ/ℓ). However, with the PEHTRA experiments, it was only possible to achieve a Δℓ/ℓ value of 0.1 % .1 A new experimental rig (SUPER-PEHTRA) has been constructed at FZK, which allows to achieve Δℓ/ℓ values of 0.3 % and to measure the pressure of the expanding bed on the containing walls. First experiments with a binary bed have been performed.2 The present paper reports on further experiments with binary beds and the establishing of equations correlating the data obtained for the present binary beds and for the binary bed experiments described in Ref. [2].