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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
Nobukatsu Nemoto, Keiji Nagai, Yoshitaka Ono, Kei Tanji, Tomoya Tanji, Mitsuo Nakai, Takayoshi Norimatsu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 4 | May 2006 | Pages 695-700
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1188
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper deals with the development of materials without volume change in the formation of uniform low density foam capsules with fine structures. Two monomers, i.e., 5-(4-vinylbenzyl)oxymethyl-5-methyl-1,3-dioxane-2-thione (M1) and 4-vinylphenyloxirane (M2), were prepared as the comonomers polymerized with styrene. Polystyrene-based copolymers using styrene and M1 or M2 were prepared by free radical copolymerization using azobis(isobutyronitrile) (AIBN) as an initiator. The solutions of the obtained polystyrene-based copolymers in benzene/dichloromethane mixture or 4-chlorotoluene were gelated by the addition of a cationic initiator, which caused cross-linking via ring-opening polymerization of the pendant cyclic moieties. The gel was transformed into an aerogel by exchanging solvent to 2-propanol, and removal of 2-propanol using supercritical CO2. SEM images of a cross sectional view of the aerogel indicated that sub-micrometer voids were distributed randomly, and most of parts look filled bulk morphology. The density of the gel obtained from the present polystyrene-based copolymers was estimated to be 200 mg/cm , which implies existence of vacancies without observation in the SEM image, suggesting the extremely fine cell structure.