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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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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.
Kenneth Geelhood, Dean Matson, David Senor, Chad Painter
Nuclear Technology | Volume 164 | Number 2 | November 2008 | Pages 255-264
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A4024
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is currently developing a novel spherical fuel element concept that offers low fuel temperatures, low stored energy, and long core life. Fuel performance modeling has been conducted using the PNNL-developed Atoms for Peace Reactor (AFPR)-100 as a platform for demonstrating the potential of the fuel element concept. The AFPR-100 is a small [100-MW(electric), 300-MW(thermal)], water-cooled reactor concept that is designed to use established technology, be passively safe, and be proliferation resistant. The fuel performance modeling has demonstrated that this fuel element has a short thermal time constant, has low fuel temperature, provides a barrier for retention of fission products, and will have long-term dimensional stability.A technique for manufacturing these fuel elements was developed. A fabrication demonstration was conducted in cooperation with a commercial vendor to evaluate the feasibility of manufacturing the fuel elements. In order to demonstrate the proposed technique, the proposed spherical elements were produced using existing processes that could be scaled to large batch sizes. Surrogate ZrO2 kernels were substituted for the fuel in this demonstration. Thorough characterization of the fuel elements was performed at various stages in the fabrication process. The metallographic characterization included electron microscopic analysis of coating microstructure, and particular attention was paid to interface regions to search for deleterious reaction zones, debonding, and porosity. Although this demonstration is not complete, early results are promising and will be discussed in this paper.This paper will describe the fuel element, show the results of fuel performance calculations for this element, describe the proposed fabrication process, and discuss the results of a fabrication demonstration to date that has been performed for this concept.