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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. H. Anderson, P. Meekunnasombat, M. L. Corradini
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 39 | Number 2 | March 2001 | Pages 965-969
Safety and Environment | doi.org/10.13182/FST01-A11963366
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
SnxLiy and PbxLiy eutectic alloys are being considered as liquid breeding materials for nuclear fusion applications. Thus, it is important to understand the interactions that might occur if this alloy were inadvertently to contact water. In an effort to study this interaction, experiments have been conducted with the molten alloys when impacted with a vertical 2.4 m tall column of water at 30°C. The qualitative behavior of Sn75Li25 was compared with similar impacts of other candidate molten metals, specifically a lithium-lead alloy, Pb83Li171. Multiple pressure spikes were produced with Sn and Pb, while essentially only one initial pressurization followed by a few strongly damped minor peaks were observed with the different lithium alloys. Hydrogen production from the lithium water interaction was measured and used to determine the extent of the chemical reaction. Dynamic pressure traces from the physical and chemical reactions are discussed and used to compare the energetics associated with the two different eutectics. It was found that the water/eutectic interactions of Pb83Li17 and Sn75Li25 are quite similar and significantly reduced from that of pure lithium and other reactive metals.