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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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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.
Hangbok Choi, Jongwon Choi, Myung S. Yang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 131 | Number 1 | January 1999 | Pages 62-77
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE99-A2018
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the DUPIC fuel cycle, spent pressurized water reactor (PWR) fuel is refabricated as a DUPIC fuel by a dry process. Because the spent PWR fuel composition depends on the initial enrichment and burnup conditions of PWR fuel, the composition of DUPIC fuel is not uniquely defined. To reduce the effects of such a composition heterogeneity on core performance, an adjustment of DUPIC fuel composition was studied. The composition adjustment was made in two steps: mixing two spent PWR fuel assemblies of higher and lower 239Pu contents and blending in fresh uranium with the mixed spent PWR fuels. Because the fuel and core performances depend on both the absolute amount of fissile isotopes and the ratio of major fissile isotope contents, a parametric study was performed to determine the reference compositions of 235U and 239Pu. The reference enrichments of 235U and 239Pu were determined such that the DUPIC core performance is comparable to that of a natural uranium core with high spent PWR fuel utilization and low fuel cycle cost. Under this condition, it is possible to utilize 90% of spent PWR fuels as the DUPIC fuel formula. On average, the amounts of slightly enriched and depleted uranium used for blending correspond to 8.6 and 10.6%, respectively, of the mass of candidate spent PWR fuels.