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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.
Lucas P. Tucker, Shoaib Usman, Ayodeji Alajo
Nuclear Technology | Volume 194 | Number 1 | April 2016 | Pages 97-110
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-67
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Missouri University of Science and Technology Subcritical Assembly has been brought back into service and upgraded with a new neutron detection system and Internet accessibility. Before the upgrade, neutron counting was possible in only one location. Using a movable detection system housed in acrylic tubes, measurements can now be taken in any empty fuel location and at any height within the tube, making three-dimensional flux mapping possible. By connecting the new detection system to a Canberra Lynx Digital Signal Analyzer, remote users can have limited data-collecting capabilities. To further enhance the potential of the facility, a Monte Carlo N-Particle transport code (MCNP) model of the subcritical assembly was created and validated by comparing its simulated predictions to experiments conducted at the facility. An approach to the criticality experiment using the 1/M approximation showed that the MCNP model accurately predicts keff if the detectors are placed between 27 and 36 cm from the neutron source. The results of an axial flux measurement experiment taken 20.3 cm from the neutron source differed from the MCNP-simulated results by an average of 12%. Finally, the validated MCNP model was used to show the effect of removing the facility’s fixed detector tube and redistributing its fuel. MCNP simulation predicts that the new configuration would increase the multiplication factor from 0.73481 ± 0.00008 to 0.76844 ± 0.00004.