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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.
C. D. Bowman, D. C. Bowman, T. Hill, J. Long, A. P. Tonchev, W. Tornow, F. Trouw, Sven Vogel, R. L. Walter, S. Wender, V. Yuan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 159 | Number 2 | June 2008 | Pages 182-198
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE159-182
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High-resolution Bragg-edge transmission measurements were conducted on granular as well as solid samples of graphite to understand the basis for a bulk measurement of the diffusion length 24% larger than predicted by MCNP5 for bulk reactor-grade graphite. High resolution enabled a measurement of the total diffraction cross section from 1 to 200 meV. This was subtracted from the total cross section to find the inelastic cross section in the same energy range. Small-angle scattering, which has been thought to contribute to the total cross section in the region of the lowest Bragg edge, is shown not to be present in our measurement or in those of others claiming to find it. Instead, neutron total reflection from the surface of graphite microcrystals is shown to contribute to the cross section at low energies. Reactor-grade graphite is shown to have an inelastic scattering cross section over most of the energy range larger by at least 10 than the nearly perfect crystal structure of pyrolytic graphite. The ratio of inelastic scattering to diffraction at 25 meV for our graphite is inferred to be twice as large as that of graphite manufactured 50 yr ago, and we believe that our larger diffusion coefficient is rooted in this difference. The distortions in the microcrystalline structure introduced in the manufacturing of the graphite studied here at 24°C are found to be equivalent to the uncertainty in atom positions seen in heating perfect crystal graphite to a temperature of ~1800°C.