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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
Sergey S. Gorodkov
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 168 | Number 3 | July 2011 | Pages 242-247
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-37
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The dominance ratio, or more precisely the closeness to unity of the dominance ratio, is an important characteristic of large reactors. It allows the prior determination of the minimum number of source iterations required in deterministic calculations of the power spatial distribution. In this work a relatively simple approach to evaluating the dominance ratio is proposed. It essentially makes use of the symmetry of the core. The dependence of the dominance ratio on the neutron flux spatial distribution is demonstrated. Numerical results are presented for three symmetric model problems with few-group isotropic cross sections and for full-scale VVER-1000 reactor models. Also, a strategy for evaluating the dominance ratio for some nonsymmetrical assemblies is proposed and tested on a well-known fuel storage facility.