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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
Ronald D. Boyd, Sr., Aaron M. May
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 57 | Number 2 | February 2010 | Pages 129-141
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A9367
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High-heat-flux (HHF) removal (HHFR) limits can be formidable technological barriers that prevent or limit the normal implementation or optimization of new and novel devices or processes. A conjugate heat transfer HHFR simulation methodology has been developed with excellent resulting accuracy (>98.0% accurate) for predicting HHF amplification (peaking factors) and the peak flow channel inside wall temperature. The methodology can be used directly or expanded to a correlation form. Although the simulation utilized axial and swirl water flows with single-phase fully developed turbulent and subcooled flow boiling in a single-side-heated circular inside flow channel with a rectangular outer boundary, the methodology appears to be fluid- and flow regime-independent (e.g., applicable to developing or jet impingement flows) so that other fluids (e.g., gases, dielectric liquids, liquid metals) and flow regimes can be employed possibly for HHFR applications requiring specialized fluids and/or flow conditions. However, more work is required to validate the applicability of this methodology (and the correlation) to other fluids, flow regimes, and channel materials. Further, the approach can be expanded possibly to include applications employing a hypervapotron for HHFR. For the prototypic simulation cases (38.0 MW/m2) considered, the circumferential inside flow channel heat transfer coefficient distribution [h([varphi])] was not known a priori, so, h([varphi]) was determined from the unknown local inside wall heat flux via iterative finite element conjugate heat transfer analyses for flow regimes ranging from fully developed turbulent subcooled flow boiling (at the top of the flow channel) to single-phase turbulent flow (at the bottom of the flow channel).