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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 C. Kiedrowski, Forrest B. Brown, Paul P. H. Wilson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 168 | Number 3 | July 2011 | Pages 226-241
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-22
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A Monte Carlo method is developed that performs adjoint-weighted tallies in continuous-energy k-eigenvalue calculations. Each contribution to a tally score is weighted by an estimate of the relative magnitude of the fundamental adjoint mode, by way of the iterated fission probability, at the phase-space location of the contribution. The method is designed around the power iteration method such that no additional random walks are necessary, resulting in a minimal increase in computational time. The method is implemented in the Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) code. These adjoint-weighted tallies are used to calculate adjoint-weighted fluxes, point reactor kinetics parameters, and reactivity changes from first-order perturbation theory. The results are benchmarked against discrete ordinates calculations, experimental measurements, and direct Monte Carlo calculations.