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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
Paul Guss, Michael Reed, Ding Yuan, Denis Beller, Matthew Cutler, Christopher Contreras, Sanjoy Mukhopadhyay, Scott Wilde
Nuclear Technology | Volume 185 | Number 3 | March 2014 | Pages 309-321
Technical Paper | Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-2
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Gamma-ray energy spectra were acquired for different sizes of cerium tribromide (CeBr3), cerium-doped lanthanum tribromide (LaBr3:Ce), and thallium-doped sodium iodide (NaI:Tl) detectors. A comparison was conducted of the energy resolution and detection efficiency of these scintillator detectors for different sizes of detectors. The results of this study are consistent with the observation that for each size detector, LaBr3:Ce offers better resolution than either a CeBr3 or NaI:Tl detector of the same size. In addition, CeBr3 and LaBr3:Ce detectors could resolve some closely spaced peaks in the spectra of several radioisotopes that NaI:Tl could not. As the detector size increased, all three detector materials exhibited higher efficiency, albeit with slightly reduced resolution. Significantly, the very low intrinsic activity of CeBr3 is also demonstrated in this study, which, when combined with energy resolution characteristics for a range of detector sizes, could lead to an improved ability to detect special nuclear materials compared to the other detectors.