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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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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.
Yang Tang, Yangping Zhou, Zhiwei Zhou, Lei Shi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 200 | Number 1 | October 2017 | Pages 27-44
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1352329
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Different from most current commercial nuclear power plants, the High-Temperature gas-cooled Reactor Pebble-bed Module (HTR-PM) power plant consists of two reactor modules connected to a common steam turbine system that will bring a special coupling effect between the two reactor modules. An engineering simulator of the HTR-PM plant was developed by embedding the THERMIX/BLAST code into the vPower simulation platform. Two sets of nuclear steam supply systems of HTR-PM, including two reactors, two steam generators, two helium blowers, and the helium flow ducts, were simulated by two THERMIX/BLAST code modules, respectively. The entire secondary loop system was simulated using intrinsic models of the vPower simulation platform. The vPower platform connects and synchronizes the two THERMIX/BLAST modules, as well as the simulation module for the secondary loop system. The engineering simulator was applied to simulate the behavior of HTR-PM under steady-state operation, startup and shutdown processes, and accident conditions. The coupling effect during the condition conversion process and the thermal characteristics under accident conditions of HTR-PM were analyzed by the engineering simulator.