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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.
Kazuhiro Kobayashi, Hirofumi Nakamura, Takumi Hayashi, Toshihiko Yamanishi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1335-1338
Detritiation and Isotope Separation | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12676
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Transport properties of tritiated water vapor (HTO) in the epoxy paint such as adsorption, desorption, diffusion and dissolution has been evaluated by investigating the HTO exposure and removal behavior from the epoxy paint in order to generate a data base on tritium behavior in tritium-confinement facilities such as the Hot Cell and the tritium plant building in ITER. Two types of experiments were carried out; one was the HTO exposure to the epoxy paint, and the other was the detritiation curves from the epoxy paint after the HTO exposure. Stainless steel vessel chambers with the epoxy painted inside surfaces were first exposed to an air flow containing HTO vapor (740 Bq/cm3) for 1 week, 2 weeks and 2 months. After these exposures, detritiation of these chambers with an air flow was carried out. It was found that the interaction between the surface of the epoxy paint and the HTO such as adsorption and desorption is reached the steady state under these conditions. Based on experimental detritiation curves, the transport properties were evaluated using the tritium transport analysis code, TMAP. The trapping effect is the strong bonds between the HTO and the epoxy such as the chemical bonds, which is represented by trapped HTO in this analysis. Although diffusivity and solubility of HTO in epoxy paints almost agreed with the previous investigations, trapping like effect should be considered to explain observed detritiation behavior.