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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.
Abdullah Kadri, Raveendra K. Rao, Jin Jiang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 166 | Number 2 | May 2009 | Pages 156-169
Technical Papers | Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-3
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
There are two major barriers in deploying wireless communication systems in nuclear power plants (NPPs): (a) the electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) between the wireless devices and the existing plant instrumentation and control systems, and (b) the high levels of electromagnetic noise and interference from high-powered devices and ionizing radiation sources. In a typical NPP there exist strict regulations that limit transmission power levels to avoid interfering with the sensitive safety systems inside the containment such as ion chambers. This will result in performance degradation of wireless communication systems. This paper proposes a wireless communication scheme based on low-power chirp spread spectrum (CSS) signals, which meet with the EMC requirements of NPPs and also are capable of providing interference rejection. The advantage of such a scheme is that satisfactory performance can be obtained using low levels of transmission power. The structure of the optimal receiver for low-power binary CSS signals and a closed-form expression for asymptotic bit error rate of this receiver are derived. The electromagnetic environment within an NPP is modeled as a Gaussian-Gaussian mixture process, which is based on the measurement data published in a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Regulation (NUREG). The parameters in the model can be adjusted to suit a particular NPP site.