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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.
Jae-Hyuk Eoh, Seyun Kim, Sang-Ji Kim, Seong-O Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 160 | Number 2 | November 2007 | Pages 216-232
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3894
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The KLFR is a pool-type lead-cooled fast reactor, which has a core thermal output of 900 MW(thermal), and a reactor vessel auxiliary cooling system (RVACS) is employed to secure reliable decay heat removal (DHR) during the worst anticipated design-basis condition. Since the RVACS design is based on reliable and economic considerations, a sufficiently large DHR capacity and compact reactor vessel size are desirable. However, these two requirements compete with each other because a sufficient DHR capacity can be achieved by a larger vessel size with a consequential heavy lead coolant weight. An advanced RVACS concept that has a larger capacity with a more compact vessel size was developed. To increase the DHR capacity of the KLFR, which uses natural-air circulation cooling, the feasibility of heat transfer enhancement by introducing new design concepts to essentially reduce the heat transfer resistance of the radial heat transfer elements was investigated. As a result of this work, the parametric analysis results showed that the passive DHR capacity of the KLFR can be substantially increased by up to 24% when compared with the classical RVACS concept, and this feature makes a compact reactor vessel very feasible. With the proposed advanced RVACS concept, one could expect that the heat removal capacity of an RVACS-type passive DHR system will be increased.