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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.
Atsushi Ui, Takamasa Miyaji
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 148 | Number 2 | October 2004 | Pages 281-290
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE04-A2458
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The best-estimate coupled three-dimensional (3-D) core and thermal-hydraulic code system TRAC-BF1/COS3D has been developed. COS3D, based on a modified one-group neutronic model, is a 3-D core simulator used for licensing analyses and core management of commercial boiling water reactor (BWR) plants in Japan. TRAC-BF1 is a plant simulator based on a two-fluid model. TRAC-BF1/COS3D is a coupled system of both codes, which are connected using a parallel computing tool. This code system was applied to the OECD/NRC BWR Turbine Trip Benchmark. Since the two-group cross-section tables are provided by the benchmark team, COS3D was modified to apply to this specification. Three best-estimate scenarios and four hypothetical scenarios were calculated using this code system. In the best-estimate scenario, the predicted core power with TRAC-BF1/COS3D is slightly underestimated compared with the measured data. The reason seems to be a slight difference in the core boundary conditions, that is, pressure changes and the core inlet flow distribution, because the peak in this analysis is sensitive to them. However, the results of this benchmark analysis show that TRAC-BF1/COS3D gives good precision for the prediction of the actual BWR transient behavior on the whole. Furthermore, the results with the modified one-group model and the two-group model were compared to verify the application of the modified one-group model to this benchmark. This comparison shows that the results of the modified one-group model are appropriate and sufficiently precise.