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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.
N. K. Popov, H. Sills, A. Abdul-Razzak
Nuclear Technology | Volume 158 | Number 1 | April 2007 | Pages 2-17
Technical Paper | Best Estimate Methods | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3820
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Advanced CANDU Reactor (ACR) is an evolutionary advancement of the current CANDU 6® reactor, aimed at producing electrical power for a capital cost and at a unit-energy cost significantly less than that of the current reactor designs. The ACR retains the modular concept of horizontal fuel channels surrounded by a heavy water moderator, as with all CANDU reactors. However, ACR uses low enriched uranium fuel, compared to the natural uranium used in CANDU 6. This achieves the twin goals of improved economics (e.g., via reductions in the heavy water requirements and the use of a light water coolant), as well as improved safety.This paper presents the approach used in developing two phenomena identification and ranking tables (PIRTs) for selected ACR-700 events and their results. One of the two selected events is a large loss-of-coolant accident, which is an ACR design basis event, while the other is a severe flow blockage, which is proposed to be classified as a limited core damage event (beyond design basis event).The paper outlines the design characteristics of the ACR-700 reactor that impact the PIRT process and computer code applicability, lists all components and systems that have an important role during the event, discusses the PIRT process and results, and presents the finalized PIRTs.The ACR-1000 reactor design is currently in detailed design at AECL, and it retains similar design features as the ACR-700 design. Although the PIRTs presented in this paper were developed for the ACR-700 design, they are generally applicable to the ACR-1000 design.