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The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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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.
Stefan Renger, Sören Alt, Ulrike Gocht, Wolfgang Kästner, André Seeliger, Holger Kryk, Ulrich Harm
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 1 | January-February 2019 | Pages 248-261
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1499324
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a joint research project of the Zittau/Goerlitz University of Applied Sciences, the Technische Universität Dresden, and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, the main emphasis is the time-related assignment of simultaneous and interacting mechanisms at zinc sources and zinc sinks at boundary conditions of a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) in German pressurized water reactors (PWRs). The required experiments are carried out at semitechnical and laboratory scales.
Zinc is used as a protective coating, e.g., for gratings in the containment, showing high corrosion resistance due to a gradual formation of passivating layers. In contrast, its long-term behavior during LOCA changes significantly under the influence of the coolant chemistry of German PWRs. As a consequence, installations in the containment act as zinc sources. Released zinc ions change the chemical properties of the coolant and could, e.g., lead to layer-forming depositions of zinc borates in the core, which increases the possibility of a hindered heat dissipation. For experimental and methodical investigations of these phenomena, the test rig Zittau flow tray, a scaled sump model of a German PWR, was equipped with a full-length 3 × 3 fuel assembly dummy acting as core model, a preheater, and a cooler component. Nine 4.4-m-long fuel rod dummies simulate the decay heat by internal heating cartridges. This rig design enables experimental investigation of physicochemical mechanisms considering coolant containing boric acid and zinc and their influence on the thermohydraulic processes in the reactor core at post-LOCA boundary conditions. Additional zinc corrosion and zinc borate precipitation studies to elucidate chemical zinc corrosion mechanisms and dependencies of those processes on typical LOCA parameters were carried out using lab-scale corrosion/precipitation test facilities.
The time-dependent zinc release at hot-dip galvanized gratings (HGGs) was investigated regarding their position (e.g., inside or near the leaking jet, freely suspended, or submerged in the coolant) and their surface area as well as the temperature and flow rate of the coolant. The experimental database allows the approximation of corrosion rates in dependence of HGG position and the accident-specific coolant leakage rate as well as first mathematical approaches for the modeling of zinc sources.