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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.
Philipp Schaedle, Nicolas Hubschwerlen, Holger Class
Nuclear Technology | Volume 187 | Number 2 | August 2014 | Pages 188-197
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-82
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The long-term safety performance of a potential deep geological repository for high-level and intermediate-level long-lived nuclear waste is studied through a numerical simulation program that requires simulation tools capable of modeling appropriately the phenomenologies of interest in the repository and its environment. Because of the complexity of the modeled layout, the numerous physical processes involved, and the simulated times (up to one million years), the computational needs are very high. TOUGH2-MP is a very suitable tool for modeling the impact that the heat and gas generated in the emplacement areas may have on the evolution of the fluid pressure and on the saturation fields in the repository's drifts and shafts as well as in the host rock itself. The module EOS7R also gives the possibility to compute a coupled radionuclide transfer. Regarding computational efficiency, it is of interest to decouple the transport from the hydraulic calculation for three main reasons. First, this allows the hydraulic calculation to be used once for several transport computations of a performance analysis and safety assessment study, which is expected to lead to a substantial gain in CPU time. Second, it allows optimization of the discretization separately for both hydraulic and transport calculations. Third, it allows combination of the TOUGH2 hydraulic and other codes modeling radionuclide transport, which allows consideration of phenomenologies that are not available in TOUGH2. This work shows how to establish a sequential approach between TOUGH2 and another code. It presents the conditions of use of such an approach, in terms of performance and the impact of the temporal discretization on the results.