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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.
Ralph W. Moir
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 26 | Number 3 | November 1994 | Pages 1169-1177
Fusion Power Reactor, Economic, and Alternate Concept | Proceedings of the Eleventh Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy New Orleans, Louisiana June 19-23, 1994 | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A40312
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
If the present research program is successful, heavy-ion beams can be used to ignite targets and to produce high gain for yields of about 350 MJ. HYLIFE-II is a power plant design based on surrounding such targets with thick liquid (Flibe, Li2BeF4) so that the chamber and other apparatus can not only stand up to these 350 MJ bursts of energy but do so without replacing components during the plant's 30-year life. The capacity factor will be increased and the cost of component replacement will be decreased. Continuous improvements to the design are being made to increase safety, decrease the generation of radioactive material, and reduce the cost of electricity (COE). Improvements discussed in this paper decreased COE for each effect by the amount in parentheses: increased plant size (22%), increased capacity factor and reduced component replacement (20%), reduced remote maintenance equipment (3.2%), use of non-nuclear grade chamber, pumps and piping (2.9%), reduced tritium inventory by a factor of 2.4, reduced excess tritium production with attendant increase energy release in the blanket (1.8%), corrected treatment of Flibe inventory costs (3.4%).