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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.
Marco Ferrari, Massimo Furrer, Giorgio Simbolotti, Carlo Talarico
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 30 | Number 3 | December 1996 | Pages 1011-1015
Fusion Blanket and Shield Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A11963069
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Following a preliminary test campaign (200 thermal cycles) on a solid breeder blanket mockup, an extended test campaign (about 1000 thermal cycles) has been carried out by ENEA. The duration of the test campaign represents a significant fraction of the blanket module lifetime in the ITER device. In particular, these out-of-pile experiments have been performed in order to test (both functional and endurance testing) the thermal-hydraulic and thermo-mechanical performance of a water cooled breeder-in-tube blanket mockup (1-PIN) using Li2ZrO3 pebbles as a breeder material.
The test campaign has been completed and the resulting data concerning thermal and thermal-hydraulic parameters have been elaborated and analyzed by means of a comparison with theoretical predictions based on a proper thermal-hydraulic model.
The post test examination of the pebbles is in progress in order to investigate the thermo-mechanical behavior of the breeder material under cycling.
The paper deals with the first part of the results.