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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.
Sara A. Pozzi, Imre Pázsit
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 153 | Number 1 | May 2006 | Pages 60-68
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2595
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We propose a simple analytical model to describe the statistics of the number of collisions undergone by fast neutrons during slowing down until they are absorbed. We assume that the moderator is homogeneous and account for scattering and absorption, but we do not consider thermalization. Although the problem cannot be solved in a compact form, a simple recurrent formula provides the solution in a very transparent way. The model can be readily evaluated numerically, and the results are in excellent agreement with the corresponding Monte Carlo simulations. Both the mean number and the variance of the number of collisions are calculated. The results are discussed and compared with the classical case of neutron slowing down to or past a given energy in a moderating medium without absorption.