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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.
Brian L. Mount, Martin Lopez de Bertodano
Nuclear Technology | Volume 171 | Number 2 | August 2010 | Pages 161-170
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A10781
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work is a three-dimensional (3-D) implementation of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model for a shutdown boron injection jet of a pressurized heavy water reactor, previously developed for the axisymmetric case. The boron shutdown system injects round boron jets into a moderator tank with an array of cylindrical coolant channels. The boron injection jets are tilted with respect to the coolant channels. The 3-D formulation allows the calculation of the curved trajectory of a jet that is deflected by the coolant channels. Furthermore, the modeling of the turbulent jet mixing is performed with a realizable k- model to obtain the concentration of boron around the jet axis. The final objective is to predict the distribution of boron inside the moderator tank to calculate the insertion of negative reactivity into the reactor during a fast shutdown with a multidimensional PARCS/RELAP5 coupled model. The implementation of the present CFD results into PARCS/RELAP5 and the neutronic results are discussed in a separate paper.A porous-medium approach is used to represent the coolant channels. This porous-medium methodology is based on a volume average of the governing equations that is equivalent to the two-fluid model used for two-phase flows. The additional source terms that appear because of the averaging (i.e., constitutive relations) in the present model are related to drag over an array of cylinders (i.e., the fuel channels) for the momentum equation and additional mixing source terms due to the cylinders for both the turbulent kinetic energy and the turbulent dissipation transport equations.The CFD model is validated with experimental data of the boron concentration distribution obtained in a 1:7.66 scale facility representing the jets and the moderator tank. Good agreement is achieved for the trajectory of the jet centerline. The transverse spreading of the boron due to turbulence is also well predicted, though the CFD results somewhat overpredict the peak concentration compared with the measurements.