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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.
Yoshinori Kawamura, Satoshi Konishi, Masataka Nishi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 1 | January 2004 | Pages 33-40
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A423
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A blanket tritium recovery system that uses an electrochemical hydrogen pump with a protonic conductor membrane is proposed. One of the advantages of this system is the potential for processing the blanket sweep gas without fractionation of hydrogen isotopes and water vapor. In this work, hydrogen in a water molecule is extracted by a hydrogen pump using a Perovskite-type ceramic such as SrCe0.95Yb0.05O3-. The threshold, which corresponds to the energy of H2O decomposition, for hydrogen extraction from the water molecule is 500 to 600 mV at 873 K. The threshold becomes smaller with increases of the partial pressure of the water vapor. In the case of pumping of the H2-H2O mixture gas, transportation of H2 precedes H2O decomposition below the threshold (H2O decomposition voltage), and the threshold becomes larger. In order to process the blanket sweep gas without fractionation of hydrogen isotope and water vapor, comparatively high applied voltage is required.
