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DNFSB spots possible bottleneck in Hanford’s waste vitrification
Workers change out spent 27,000-pound TSCR filter columns and place them on a nearby storage pad during a planned outage in 2023. (Photo: DOE)
While the Department of Energy recently celebrated the beginning of hot commissioning of the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP), which has begun immobilizing the site’s radioactive tank waste in glass through vitrification, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board has reported a possible bottleneck in waste processing. According to the DNFSB, unless current systems run efficiently, the issue could result in the interruption of operations at the WTP’s Low-Activity Waste Facility, where waste vitrification takes place.
During operations, the LAW Facility will process an average of 5,300 gallons of tank waste per day, according to Bechtel, the contractor leading design, construction, and commissioning of the WTP. That waste is piped to the facility after being treated by Hanford’s Tanks Side Cesium Removal (TSCR) system, which filters undissolved solid material and removes cesium from liquid waste.
According to a November 7 activity report by the DNFSB, the TSCR system may not be able to produce waste feed fast enough to keep up with the LAW Facility’s vitrification rate.
Kazuhisa Yuki, Yoshimasa Sugawara, Seyed Mohammad Hosseini, Hidetoshi Hashizume, Saburo Toda, Masa-aki Tanaka, Toshiharu Muramatsu
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 158 | Number 2 | February 2008 | Pages 194-202
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE08-A2746
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study aims at clarifying a relationship between nonisothermal fluid mixing in a T-junction area with a 90-deg bend upstream and temperature fluctuations induced by the unstable mixing, by visualizing the flow fields with particle image velocimetry and measuring fluid-temperature fluctuation in the vicinity of a wall. From the visualization, it is clarified that a high-temperature jet flowing out from a branch pipe swings and sways near the wall, though the mixing patterns are basically classified into the same ones without the 90-deg bend upstream. Furthermore, there are cautionary conditions in which the temperature fluctuation is maximized in a transition regime between a stratified flow and a turn-jet flow. It seems that the principal cause is repetitional generation and disappearance of a circulating flow formed behind the jet due to an interaction between unsteady behavior of a secondary flow in a decay process after the bend and the wakes formed behind the jet, which leads to the vigorous oscillation of the jet near the wall.