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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.
T. D. Radcliff, J. R. Parsons, W. S. Johnson, A. E. Ruggles
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 131 | Number 3 | March 1999 | Pages 426-438
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE99-A2044
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An existing geometric and fluid-fluid scaled facility is applied to investigate the transport of borated safety injection (SI) fluid in the Westinghouse AP600 reactor vessel during a main steam-line rupture (MSLR) event. The AP600 reactor has coaxial injection into the vessel downcomer rather than the cold-leg cross-flow injection typical of operating power reactors. This gas-flow test facility has unique detail in the representation of the SI nozzle-to-core inlet path most important to SI transport. Analysis of the transport phenomena expected in the reactor and the scaled facility, given MSLR conditions, indicates that both buoyancy and turbulent diffusion can have comparable influences on SI transport. It is shown that different reactor-to-experiment velocity ratios are required to scale each phenomenon. Tests are performed to evaluate transient SI fluid concentration at the core inlet using the appropriate velocity ratios to scale buoyancy and diffusion. Two asymmetric loop-flow boundary conditions representative of the MSLR event as well as a symmetric flow condition are applied. While no one test result is fully similar to the expected reactor transport, this ensemble of tests provides data that are valuable for AP600 numerical model benchmarking.