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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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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.
Iztok Tiselj, Cedric Flageul, Jure Oder
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 2 | February 2020 | Pages 164-178
Critical Review | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1614381
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The critical review discusses the most accurate methods for description of turbulent flows: the computationally very expensive direct numerical simulation (DNS) and slightly less accurate and slightly less expensive large eddy simulation (LES) methods. Both methods have found their way into nuclear thermal hydraulics as tools for studies of the fundamental mechanisms of turbulence and turbulent heat transfer. In the first section of this critical review, both methods are briefly introduced in parallel with the basic properties of the turbulent flows. The focus is on the DNS method, the so-called quasi-DNS approach, and the coarsest turbulence modeling approach discussed in this work, which is still on the very small-scale, wall-resolved LES. Other, coarser turbulence modeling approaches (such as wall-modeled LES, Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS)/LES hybrids, or RANS) are beyond the scope of the present work. Section II answers the question: “How do the DNS and LES methods work?” A short discussion of the computational requirements, numerical approaches, and computational tools is included. Section III is about the interpretation of the DNS and LES results and statistical uncertainties. Sections IV and V give some examples of the DNS and wall-resolved LES results relevant for nuclear thermal hydraulics. The last section lists the conclusions and some of the challenges that might be tackled with the most accurate techniques like DNS and LES.