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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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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.
Aaron M. Thomas, Jun Fang, Jinyong Feng, Igor A. Bolotnov
Nuclear Technology | Volume 190 | Number 3 | June 2015 | Pages 274-291
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-72
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The goal of the present study is to demonstrate that direct numerical simulations (DNS) coupled with interface tracking methods can be used to estimate interfacial forces in two-phase flows. Current computational multiphase fluid dynamics codes model interfacial forces utilizing closure laws that are heavily dependent on limited experimental data and simplified analytical approximations. In the present work, a method for improving the current interfacial force database has been developed by using DNS to quantify the lift and drag forces on a single bubble in laminar and turbulent shear flows. A proportional-integral-derivative–based controller was implemented into the finite element–based, multiphase flow solver [PHASTA (Parallel, Hierarchic, higher-order accurate, Adaptive, Stabilized, finite element method Transient Analysis)] to control the bubble position. This capability allowed for utilization of a steady-state force balance on the bubble to determine lift and drag coefficients in various shear flows. Specifically, for low shear flows (2.0 s−1), the effect of the wall presence is analyzed, and for high shear flows, the effect of turbulence is studied. A number of uniform shear (10.0 to 470.0 s−1) laminar flows were simulated to assess lift and drag force behavior as the kinetic energy of the flow increased. Two high shear (236.0 and 470.0 s−1) turbulent flows were simulated to understand bubble-turbulence interaction influence on the drag and lift phenomena. Two uniform shear rates (20.0 and 100 s−1) were simulated utilizing pressurized water reactor fluid properties. The lift and drag coefficients estimated in this work are in agreement with models developed for low shear laminar flows, whereas for high shear laminar and turbulent flows, bubble-turbulence interaction became a dominating influence in the lift and drag coefficient estimation. The novel results and method presented in this paper offer a path to simulating full-fledged reactor coolant environments where the lift and drag forces on a single bubble can be studied.