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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.
Roberta Concilio Hansson, Hyun Sun Park, Truc-Nam Dinh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 167 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 223-234
Technical Paper | NURETH-12 / Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A8864
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The present study aims to develop a mechanistic understanding of the thermal-hydraulic processes in a vapor explosion, which may occur in nuclear power plants during a hypothetical severe accident, involving interactions of high-temperature corium melt and volatile coolant. Dynamics of the hot liquid (melt) droplet and the volatile liquid (coolant) were investigated in the Micro-Interactions in Steam Explosion Experiments (MISTEE) facility by performing well-controlled, externally triggered, single-droplet experiments, using a high-speed visualization system with synchronized digital cinematography and continuous X-ray radiography, called Simultaneous High-speed Acquisition of X-ray Radiography and Photography (SHARP). After an elaborate image processing, the SHARP images depict the evolution of both melt material (dispersal) and coolant (bubble dynamics) and their microscale interactions. The analysis of the data shows a deficiency in using the bubble dynamics alone to provide a consistent explanation of the energetic behavior. In contrast, the SHARP data reveal a correlation between the droplet's dynamics in the bubble's first cycle and the energetics of the subsequent explosive evaporation in the bubble's second cycle. The finding provides a basis to suggest that a so-called melt-droplet preconditioning, i.e., deformation/prefragmentation of a hot melt droplet immediately following the pressure trigger, is instrumental to the subsequent coolant entrainment, evaporation, and energetics of the resulting vapor explosion.