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The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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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.
Igor Krivitski, Mikhail Vorotyntsev, Valentin Pyshin, Ludmila Korobeinikova
Nuclear Technology | Volume 143 | Number 3 | September 2003 | Pages 281-289
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3417
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The solving of ecological problems of future nuclear power is connected with the solving of long-lived radioactive waste utilization problems. This concerns primarily plutonium and minor actinides (neptunium, americium, and curium), accumulated in the spent fuel of nuclear reactors. One of the ways this can be solved is to use a fast reactor with uranium-free fuel. The physics of this type of reactor was widely investigated during the last year for the BN-800 reactor. The solutions of the most important problems were (a) a decrease in nonuniformity of the power distribution and (b) an increase of the Doppler effect. The next stage of such core investigations is an evaluation of self-protection to beyond-design accidents. Preliminary results show a high safety level of the BN-800 reactor with uranium-free fuel in unprotected loss-of-flow and unprotected transient overpower events.