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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.
N. Nunomura, S. Sunada, K. Watanabe
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 1155-1158
Blanket and Breeder Materials | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12620
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Adsorption of H2O on the -Al2O3 (0001) surface was studied by means of a first-principles calculation based on density functional theory (DFT). We also investigated the behavior of the isotope exchange by substituting a protium atom with deuterium or tritium. The oxygen atom of H2O adsorbs on the Al atom of the outermost surface layer, the entire water molecule is slanted at the direction of a hollow site, and a molecular plane is nearly parallel to the surface. The adsorbed states are mostly due to coupling of lone-pair electrons of H2O with the empty p orbitals of the Al atom of surface. The behavior of dissociation for H2O is clarified from molecular dynamics simulations, indicating that the second neighbor oxygen atom is more preferable adsorption site for dissociation than the nearest neighbor oxygen atom on the surface.
