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The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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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.
Luciano Burgazzi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 144 | Number 2 | November 2003 | Pages 145-151
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT144-145
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A methodology, to quantify the reliability of passive safety systems, proposed for use in advanced reactor design, is developed. Passive systems are identified as systems that do not need any external input or energy to operate and rely only upon natural physical laws (e.g., gravity, natural circulation, heat conduction, internally stored energy, etc.) and/or intelligent use of the energy inherently available in the system (e.g., chemical reaction, decay heat, etc.). The reliability of a passive system refers to the ability of the system to carry out the required function under the prevailing condition when required: The passive system may fail its mission, in addition to the classical mechanical failure of its components, for deviation from the expected behavior, due to physical phenomena or to different boundary and initial conditions. The present research activity is finalized at the reliability estimation of passive B systems (i.e., implementing moving working fluids, see IAEA); the selected system is a loop operating in natural circulation including a heat source and a heat sink.The functional reliability concept, defined as the probability to perform the required mission, is introduced, and the R-S (Resistance-Stress) model taken from fracture mechanics is adopted. R and S are coined as expressions of functional Requirement and system State. Water mass flow circulating through the system is accounted as a parameter defining the passive system performance, and probability distribution functions (pdf's) are assigned to both R and S quantities; thus, the mission of the passive system defines which parameter values are considered a failure by comparing the corresponding pdfs according to a defined safety criteria. The methodology, its application, and results of the analysis are presented and discussed.