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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.
Joonhong Ahn
Nuclear Technology | Volume 121 | Number 1 | January 1998 | Pages 24-39
Technical Paper | Kiyose Birthday Anniversary | doi.org/10.13182/NT121-24
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Presented are results of a mathematical analysis on radionuclide transport in parallel planar fractures in water-saturated geologic formations integrated with the source term model, where precipitation of hardly soluble species at the waste-form alteration location and subsequent radionuclide transport in the engineered barriers are considered. Radioactive decay chains of an arbitrary length are considered. A computer code has been developed based on the analytical solutions.The major hazard contributors are 241Am and 243Am in the waste form; 239Pu, 229Th, and 243Am at the surface of the engineered barriers; 223Ra, 231Pa, and 227Ac at a 10-m location from the engineered barriers; and 99Tc, 223Ra, and 225Ra at a 100-m location. With a transport distance of 100 m through the natural barrier, a four-orders-of-magnitude reduction in the total hazard is observed.Thus, the importance of the region in the vicinity of the engineered barriers in the context of the safety assessment can be pointed out. Because the region is disturbed by repository construction, further analysis must be performed by taking into account differing geochemical, hydrological, and mechanical properties from those in the undisturbed host rock.Because the major contributors in the host rock are the decay daughters of minor actinides, recovery of minor actinides reduces the total hazard evaluated at the exit of the geosphere. However, the radiological hazard would be reduced much more effectively by the 100-m-thick geologic formation around the repository than by even a 99% recovery of the actinides.