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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.
Tsunetaka Banba, Takashi Murakami
Nuclear Technology | Volume 70 | Number 2 | August 1985 | Pages 243-248
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33648
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Soxhlet-type leaching experiments were carried out for 200 days and the leaching solutions analyzed by inductively coupled plasma spectroscopy and atomic absorption spectroscopy. The data of the solution analysis and the results of our previous study on the surface layers revealed the fact that elements in the waste glass were classified into three groups and were released into solution in accordance with the following mechanisms: Group I contained sodium, cesium, potassium, boron, and molybdenum; the release of the group I elements was controlled by diffusion and decomposition processes in the glass. Group II contained manganese, iron, nickel, zirconium, yttrium, lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, samarium, and dysprosium; the release of the group II elements was controlled by solubility of the sheet silicate formed in the surface layers. Group III contained silicon, aluminum, calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium, and chromium; the release of the group III elements was controlled by diffusion and decomposition processes in the glass, and was also affected by formation of the sheet silicate.