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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. Drosg, P. W. Lisowski
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 175 | Number 1 | September 2013 | Pages 19-27
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE12-7
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Reliable nonelastic cross-section measurements of fast neutrons with 3He are sparse. In the energy range up to 40 MeV, the data are dominated by unpublished nonelastic n-3He values derived from measurements made in 1982. As mentioned elsewhere, n-3He elastic cross-section data reported in the same report had not been corrected for the outgoing neutron attenuation even though the sample size was >7 mol. To check the database of existing nonelastic n-3He cross-section data, and in particular those from 1982, a detailed balance calculation of time-reversed charged-particle data was performed. Because there are few existing independent data, we provide an updated detailed balance analysis in the energy range up to 31 MeV for both 3He(n,p)3H and 3He(n,d)2H, supplying accurate absolute-angle-dependent differential cross sections. Subtracting the integrals of these and the elastic cross sections from the total provides a prediction for the sum of the 3He(n,2n)2p and 3He(n,n + p)2H cross sections. The relevant experimental data are compared with their time-reversed counterparts.