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The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
Bartlomiej Z. Wierzbicki, Steven P. Antal, Michael Z. Podowski
Nuclear Technology | Volume 158 | Number 2 | May 2007 | Pages 261-274
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3841
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ability to predict the shape of gas/liquid interface is important for various multiphase flow and heat transfer applications. Specific issues of interest to nuclear reactor thermal hydraulics include the evolution of the shape of bubbles attached to solid surfaces during nucleation, bubble/surface interactions in complex geometries, etc. The development of an innovative approach to model the time-dependent shape of gas/liquid interfaces is discussed. The proposed approach combines a modified level-set method with an advanced computational fluid dynamics code, NPHASE. The coupled numerical solver can be used to simulate the evolution of gas/liquid interfaces in two-phase flows for a variety of geometries and flow conditions.The novel aspects of the work include the development of direct coupling between the level-set algorithm and the finite-volume code NPHASE, the development of a novel mass conservation algorithm for the level-set method, the analysis of the influence of fluid physical properties on the predicted bubble flow conditions, and the use of a three-dimensional model to simulate gas bubble flow in channels of various geometries and orientations.