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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.
Marzio Marseguerra, Enrico Zio, Raffaele Canetta
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 153 | Number 2 | June 2006 | Pages 124-136
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2600
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For realistic systems, a dynamic approach to reliability analysis is likely to require a significant increase in the computational efforts, due to the need of integrating the dynamic evolution with its characteristic times. Thus, it becomes mandatory to resort to validated, simplified models of process evolution. Such models are typically based on lumped effective parameters whose values need to be suitably estimated so as to best fit to the available plant data.In this paper we propose a multiobjective genetic algorithm approach for the estimation of the effective parameters of a simplified model of nuclear reactor dynamics. The calibration of the effective parameters is achieved by best fitting the model responses of the quantities of interest to the actual evolution profiles. A case study is reported in which the real reactor is simulated by the QUAndry-based Reactor Kinetics (QUARK) code available from the Nuclear Energy Agency, and the simplified model is based on the point-kinetics approximation to describe the neutron balance in the core and on thermal equilibrium relations to describe the energy exchange between the different loops. The (pseudo)measured quantities of interest are the reactor power and the average fuel temperature.