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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.
David Hanlon, Nigel Smith, Jim Gulliford
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 145 | Number 1 | September 2003 | Pages 120-131
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE03-A2368
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Modern nuclear criticality safety analysis places great reliance on calculations performed using computer codes, in particular, those employing the Monte Carlo method of solution. In the United Kingdom the acknowledged standard Monte Carlo code for criticality safety assessment is MONK. The accuracy achievable with MONK is ultimately governed by the accuracy of the nuclear data employed and their representation within the code nuclear data library. The U.K. industry uses JEFF-based libraries, taking advantage of modern nuclear data evaluations. Following the release of a frozen version of the library (JEF2.2), a program of work was undertaken in the United Kingdom to develop nuclear data libraries for use in reactor physics, shielding, and criticality application codes and to provide benchmark evidence to support their use. For criticality, this involved developing a hyper-fine-group energy library for the MONK code and undertaking a large program of comparison calculations for selected international experiments. A significant contribution to this validation effort has been the high-quality experimental data from the International Criticality Safety Benchmark Evaluation Project (ICSBEP) International Handbook of Evaluated Critical Safety Benchmark Experiments. This paper summarizes the work involved in arriving at the current stage whereby the use of MONK in conjunction with a JEF2.2-based library is accepted within the U.K. nuclear industry. Specific examples are given, where ICSBEP has provided experimental evaluations for application areas previously unsupported by more traditional experimental data sources.