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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.
Brian J. Egle, Gerald L. Kulcinski
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 518-522
Experimental Facilities and Nonelectric Applications | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8955
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Design, modeling and simulation work has been done to develop a system of producing radioisotopes by using D-3He fusion and the Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) fusion concept. This work provides a set of requirements for moving from the previous proof-of-concept experiments to medically relevant dosages of the radioisotopes used in Position Emission Tomography (PET). This study focuses primarily on the production of 11C from the 14N(p, ) 11C reaction, and could be extended to additional PET isotopes. A target was designed for gaseous parent materials; it consists of vacuum tight panels placed inside the vacuum vessel of an IEC device. The side facing the isotropic source of 14.7 MeV fusion protons is a thin metal foil (~0.5 mm of Ti). The foil acts to separate the vacuum environment of the IEC device from the pressured gaseous environment of the target. Parametric analysis of the foil thickness and 14N gas pressure was performed to optimize the efficiency of fusion protons in producing 11C. The MCNPX 2.5.0 simulations predicted that an optimized system could produce 390 nCi of 11C with the present laboratory scale IEC device at the University of Wisconsin, which has a D-3He fusion rate of 2 x 107 protons per sec (p/s).