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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.
Ki Yong Choi, Hyun Sik Park, Dong Jin Euh, Tae Soon Kwon, Won Pil Baek
Nuclear Technology | Volume 156 | Number 3 | December 2006 | Pages 256-269
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3789
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A thermal-hydraulic integral-effect test facility [advanced thermal-hydraulic test loop for accident simulation (ATLAS)] is being constructed at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute. The ATLAS is a one-half-reduced-height and 1/288-volume-scaled test facility based on the design features of the APR1400, an evolutionary pressurized water reactor developed by the Korean industry. The simulation capability of the ATLAS for major design-basis accidents (DBAs), including a large-break loss-of-coolant accident and direct vessel injection line-break and main-steam-line-break accidents, is evaluated by the best-estimate system code MARS with the same control logics, transient scenarios, and nodalization scheme. The validity of the applied scaling law and the thermal-hydraulic similarity between the ATLAS and the APR1400 for the major DBAs are assessed. It is confirmed that the ATLAS can maintain an overall similarity with the reference plant APR1400 for the major DBAs considered in the study. However, depending on the accident scenarios, there are some inconsistencies in certain thermal-hydraulic parameters, such as cladding temperature, subcooling at the lower plenum of the core, break flow rate, core and downcomer water level, and secondary pressure. The causes of the inconsistencies are carefully investigated by considering the detailed design features of the ATLAS. It is found that the inconsistencies are mainly due to the reduced power effect and the increased stored energy in the structure. The similarity analysis was successful in obtaining a greater insight into the unique design features of the ATLAS and would be used for developing optimized experimental procedures and control logics.