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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.
Min-Jie Chuang, Shih-Jen Wang, Sheng-Yuan Fann, Show-Chyuan Chiang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 167 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 247-253
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A8961
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Generic severe accident guidelines (SAGs) of a boiling water reactor are developed based on the Mark-I containment system. There are many intrinsic features of Mark-III containment including the following: the drywell does not form a part of the primary containment boundary, it has large containment free volume, the drywell is enclosed by the primary containment, and the drywell and the primary containment are located parallel on the same elevation.Because of the features of the Mark-III system and its benefit to the containment flooding strategy, it is found that the associated containment flooding strategy can be simplified. The seven legs in the containment flooding strategy are reduced to four legs. The five rows of check logic are reduced to three. Simplifying the SAG charts whenever possible increases the probability of a successful outcome. The tedious and time-consuming work of identifying the reactor pressure vessel status can be removed. It saves time for decision making in emergency conditions.