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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Hiroko Ohuchi, Yasuhiro Kondo, Yamato Asakura, Takao Kawano
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 944-947
Measurement, Monitoring, and Accountancy | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12571
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An imaging plate (IP) was applied to measure tritium in high 60Co gamma-ray radiation fields. The IP made of europium-doped BaFBr(I), a photostimulated luminescence (PSL) material, is a two-dimensional radiation sensor. The PSL response of the IP has a peak at 20-50 keV and steeply decreases towards higher energy, falling by one hundredth at around 1 MeV. By utilizing a large difference in the PSL response to photon energy between 60Co (1.173 and 1.333 MeV) and tritium (maximum energy of 18.6 keV), the bremsstrahlung X-ray induced by tritium beta ray was detected in mixed radiation fields with tritium and 60Co, varying 60Co dose rate in the range 0.0013 to 9.22 Gy/min. It was found that the effect of 60Co irradiation to PSL value, obtained by irradiated with tritium of 12.5 MBq, was negligible by dose rate of 4.38 Gy/min and there was only 7.0% difference of PSL value, obtained by irradiated with tritium of 100 MBq, between dose rate of 0.0013 and 9.22 Gy/min. The IP tritium measurement method can be a promising candidate to measure tritium in high gamma-ray radiation fields.
