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Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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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 126 | Number 3 | June 1999 | Pages 303-318
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A2976
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An assessment for the criticality safety of a conceptual repository for vitrified high-level radioactive waste from reprocessed fuel of commercial light water reactors in a water-saturated granitic rock has been performed by quantitatively estimating the mass of fissile 235U existing in the entire far field as the performance measure. The uncertainties associated with the performance measure have been obtained by a statistical analysis with the Latin hypercube sampling method.With the assumed probability distribution functions for the model parameters, the mass of 235U released from the repository and existing in the far field at 100 million years is estimated to be <40 kg with a 90% confidence level. This implies that all 235U existing in the entire far field at that time must accumulate in a single location for an overmoderated criticality event to occur in granitic rock.
