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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.
Victor C. Leite, Roberto Schirru, Miguel Mattar Neto
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 5 | May 2019 | Pages 637-645
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1516056
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the main roles of the nuclear fuel bundle spacer grid (SG) is to safely support the fuel rods (FRs) through springs and dimples. The SG design is an important matter for nuclear power plant operation when a damaged FR could release fission products. For this work, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is applied to define the geometries of the springs and dimples existing in a SG. Other algorithms had been used to optimize these geometries but not PSO. This paper proposes a PSO variable model and its fitness function in order to define an optimized geometry for the spring and the dimple so that they can provide sufficient gripping forces and minimize stresses. The implemented PSO was able to generate geometries of springs and dimples with stresses minimized and with a specific required stiffness value. The results of these two characteristics are compared with other results in the literature. For further work, PSO will be used to optimize other important design characteristics of a SG: grid-to-rod fretting, coolant flow-induced vibration, and the function of mixing coolant.