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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.
Raphael Craplet, Joonhong Ahn
Nuclear Technology | Volume 177 | Number 3 | March 2012 | Pages 314-335
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A13478
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A mathematical model for mass flow in a generic nuclear fuel cycle was developed. The model can describe various fuel cycle configurations (ranging from once-through to multiple recycling) and reactor types with several regions and batches. It can also be used as a submodel in a regional or global fuel cycle system. Recursive equations for the fuel composition at each point of the cycle were obtained. For specific simplified cases, nonrecursive and equilibrium equations were also derived for compositions, with which the waste reduction ratio was formulated as a function of the system parameters, to show usage of this model for theoretical understanding of the relationship between parameters and performances of the system. A numerical code for this mathematical model was developed. For a simplified equilibrium cycle, sensitivity and constrained optimization of the toxicity reduction ratio with respect to the system parameters were investigated by using the present model and code. It appears that the most important parameter to minimize waste toxicity is the separation efficiency at reprocessing. High fuel enrichment is beneficial because it expands the parametric space within the constraints. Also, depending on the constraints that apply, either the irradiation time or the fraction of core reprocessed at each cycle will be the second most important parameter.