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Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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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.
Andrej Prošek, Boštjan Končar, Matjaž Leskovar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1661-1674
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1562820
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Prediction of highly turbulent flows using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools is not an easy task. Besides the uncertainty in the choice of turbulence model parameters, the physical properties of the fluid and experimental boundary conditions also can be largely affected by uncertainties. The objective of the study is uncertainty quantification of CFD simulation to obtain figures of merits, downstream velocity, and turbulence kinetic energy. The water-mixing experiment in the GEneric MIxing Experiment (GEMIX) facility performed at Paul Scherrer Institute is used as a benchmark case. The NEPTUNE_CFD code that solves Reynolds-averaged Navier Stokes equations with k-eps turbulence model has been used to perform a series of simulations. For uncertainty quantification with the Monte Carlo method the Optimal Statistical Estimator (OSE) was used for response surface (RS) generation from the set of CFD calculations. The results of the uncertainty analysis show that OSE is a very suitable method for RS generation, which is then used in uncertainty analysis using the Monte Carlo method to determine the 5% lower limit and 95% upper limit with 95% confidence level. In this way, the impact of some sources of uncertainty is evaluated. Also, OSE can reproduce the CFD simulation with high accuracy at the CFD calculation points, even in the case when only 5 out of 40 calculation points are used for RS generation. The results further suggest that it is very important to perform accurate reference calculation and select appropriate ranges of variation for uncertain input parameters.