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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. L. Woosley, Jr., R. A. Rydin
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 129 | Number 1 | May 1998 | Pages 15-50
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE98-A1961
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The recent revival of interest in accelerator-driven subcritical fluid-fueled systems is documented. Several important applications of these systems are mentioned, and this is used to motivate the need for dynamic analysis of the nuclear kinetics of such systems. A physical description of the Los Alamos National Laboratory accelerator-based conversion (ABC) concept is provided. This system is used as the basis for the kinetics study in this research.The current approach to the dynamic simulation of an accelerator-driven subcritical fluid-fueled system includes four functional elements: A discrete ordinates model is used to calculate the flux distribution for the source-driven system; a nodal convection model is used to calculate time-dependent isotope and temperature distributions that impact reactivity; a nodal importance weighting model is used to calculate the reactivity impact of temperature and isotope distributions and to feed this information back to the time-dependent nodal convection model; and a transient driver is used to simulate transients, model the balance of plant, and record simulation data.Specific transients that have been analyzed with the current modeling system are discussed. These transients include loss-of-flow and loss-of-cooling accidents, xenon and samarium transients, and cold-plug and overfueling events. The results of various transients have uncovered unpredictable behavior, unresolved design issues, and the need for active control. The need for the development of a nodal-coupling spatial kinetics model is mentioned.