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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.
Hiroshi Noguchi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 27 | Number 2 | March 1995 | Pages 56-61
doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A11963805
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The conversion reaction of tritium gas to tritiated water in dry air has been studied using low–concentration tritium gases which have three different hydrogen isotope compositions. The conversion was directly proportional to a ratio of radioactivity of T2 to that of total tritium. This demonstrates that the T2 decay process is predominant for the conversion reaction at low initial tritium concentrations. First-order rate constants for the reaction in dry air are found to be independent of initial tritium concentration. A model to predict the rate constant of the production of tritiated water from T2 in dry air has been developed. The modeling results show that the T2 decay process is predominant at low concentrations, while O+ and N2+ ions formed through tritium beta-ray induced reactions play important roles at high concentrations.
