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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.
Akash Tondon, Mohinder Singh, B. S. Sandhu, Bhajan Singh
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 11 | November 2019 | Pages 1265-1275
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2019.1614802
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The voxel, defined as the volume of the intersection between incident (primary) and scattered beams, plays an important role in the localization of defects in samples having several interests. In this work, the gamma rays emitted from a 137Cs radioactive source (having the strength of 222 GBq) are scattered from various regions of a wood sample. The scattered gamma flux is detected by an NaI(Tl) scintillation detector placed at 110 deg to the primary gamma-ray beam. Defect (decay) in the wood is simulated by drilling two collinear cylindrical flaws (having diameters of 0.8 and 1.2 cm) in the wood sample and then filling it with a mixture of sawdust and glue. Three sets of collimators with diameters of 6, 7, and 8 mm for the source and detector are used to vary the voxel size (volume). It has been found that better contrast (29.43% for a 1.2-cm defect and 16.37% for an 0.8-cm defect) is achieved for the smallest voxel (16.13 cm3) in comparison to the other two voxels (25.65 and 38.36 cm3). Further, better contrast for the smallest voxel is confirmed by comparing gray images obtained using MATLAB for all three voxel sizes at different scan positions. It has been concluded that for a given experimental setup, the accuracy of defect (decay) detection demands reduced voxel size.