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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.
Y.-J. Huang, H. Paul Wang, S. H. Liu, M. C. Hsiao
Nuclear Technology | Volume 138 | Number 2 | May 2002 | Pages 206-210
Technical Note | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-A3288
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Spent low-level radioactive (LLRA) cation ion exchange resins (consisting of base copolymers of styrene and divinyl benzene and sulfonic acid) are difficult to treat effectively by conventional cement-solidification methods. Pyrolysis of the spent LLRA resin has been recognized to be very effective in reducing the volume and mass of the waste. Experimentally, we found by the thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) method that the activation energy for the pyrolysis of an LLRA resin was 319.2 kJ/mol. The reaction order and pre-exponential factor were 0.61 and 1.1 × 1020 s-1, respectively. Note that during the pyrolysis, ~50% of the SO42- species in the resin was decomposed to SO2 at 673 to 873 K. At high temperatures (>873 K), most of the aromatics of the resin were also thermally cracked.
