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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.
Gregg A. Morgan, Jr.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1367-1370
Detritiation and Isotope Separation | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12684
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A commercially fabricated diffuser purchased from Johnson-Matthey, Inc. was evaluated for performance characterization testing at the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL). Different impurities are often present in the feed streams of the process diffusers, but the effect of these impurities on the diffuser performance is currently unknown. Various impurities were introduced into the feed stream of the diffuser at various levels ranging from 0.5% to 10% of the total flow in order to determine the effect that these impurities have on the permeation of hydrogen through the palladium-silver membrane. The introduction of various impurities into the feed stream of the diffuser had a minimal effect on the overall permeation of hydrogen through the Pd-Ag membrane. Of the four impurities introduced into the feed stream, carbon monoxide (CO) was the only impurity that showed any evidence of causing a reduction in the amount of hydrogen permeating through the Pd-Ag membrane. The hydrogen permeation returned to its baseline level after the CO was removed from the feed stream. There were no lasting effects of the CO exposure on the ability of the membrane to effectively separate hydrogen from the non-hydrogen species in the gas stream under the conditions tested.