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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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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.
Jung-Woo Kim, Dong-Keun Cho, Nak-Youl Ko, Jongtae Jeong, Min-Hoon Baik
Nuclear Technology | Volume 203 | Number 1 | July 2018 | Pages 1-16
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1426331
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
New methodology for a risk-based safety assessment of a geological disposal system of nuclear waste was implemented using the numerical Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) Performance Assessment Model (K-PAM). K-PAM was applied to a conceptual geological disposal system for pyroprocessed radioactive wastes based on the KAERI Underground Research Tunnel (KURT) site. The methodology was systematically organized for model development considering two types of external events: earthquakes and well intrusion. Following description of its conceptual models and submodules, K-PAM was partially verified by comparing the consequences of two major modules of K-PAM—engineered barrier system and natural barrier system—with those by a well-known, comparable process model using COMSOL. In addition, K-PAM was demonstrated using three scenarios: (1) the reference scenario, in which the normal consequences of the disposal system without external events could be predicted; (2) the deterministic complex scenario, in which the impacts of individual external events on the disposal system could be estimated separately; and (3) the probabilistic complex scenario, in which the efficiency of the new methodology for a risk-based safety assessment could be confirmed numerically by showing the probable maximum dose rate according to any single scenario, the convergence of risk, the dominant impacts contributing to the maximum dose rate, and the probability of occurrence of the scenario groups.