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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.
L. Lüdemann, R. Kampmann, W. Sosaat, P. Staron, P. Wille
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 135 | Number 1 | May 2000 | Pages 57-63
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE00-A2124
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new irradiation facility, GBET (basic research on boron neutron capture therapy), especially designed for in vitro experiments on boron neutron capture therapy was put into operation at the Geesthacht Neutron Facility of the GKSS Research Center. Its location at a cold-neutron guide without direct view of the reactor core has two advantages: First, contamination of the primary beam with fast neutrons or photons is negligible. Second, GBET yields a high cold-neutron flux of 1.4 × 108/(cm2s) over an area of 3 × 4 cm. As a result of the energy dependence of the neutron absorption cross section of boron, this corresponds to a higher effective thermal flux of 4.7 × 108/(cm2s). This effect is used to reduce the irradiation times by a factor of 3.32.The effective flux is sufficient for irradiation of thin samples like cell monolayers in conventional culture flasks. For such in vitro irradiations, a survival fraction of 1% is achieved at a homogeneous boron concentration of 100 ppm 10B within ~20 min. Furthermore, the beam can be used for boron radiography. The respective experimental conditions are discussed, especially the neutron flux distribution, available for these different types of samples.