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Latest News
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.
L. C. Leal, H. Derrien, N. M. Larson, R. Q. Wright
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 131 | Number 2 | February 1999 | Pages 230-253
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE99-A2031
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new R-matrix analysis of the 235U cross-section data in the 0- to 2250-eV energy region is presented. The analysis was performed with the SAMMY computer code that has recently been updated to permit, for the first time, inclusion of both differential and integral data within the analysis process. Fourteen differential data sets and six integral quantities were used in this evaluation: two measurements of fission plus capture, one of fission plus absorption, six of fission alone, two of transmission, and one of eta, plus standard values of thermal cross sections for fission and capture, and of K1 and the Westcott g factors for both fission and absorption. An excellent representation was obtained for the high-resolution transmission, fission, and capture cross-section data as well for the integral quantities. The result is a single set of resonance parameters spanning the entire range up to 2250 eV, a decided improvement over the present ENDF/B-VI evaluation, in which 11 discrete resonance parameter sets are required to cover that same energy range. This new evaluation is expected to greatly improve predictability of the criticality safety margins for nuclear systems in which 235U is present.