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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.
T. Otsuka, M. Shimada, T. Tanabe, J. P. Sharpe
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1539-1542
Interaction with Materials | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12726
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to understand behavior of tritium (T) on surface and in bulk of metals exposed to T plasma, both surface activities and depth profiles of T were periodically observed by a tritium imaging plate technique during storage in air at room temperature (RT) for over 1 year. In the T depth profiles, T localized within a depth of sub mm from the surface was clearly distinguished from T in the bulk. The former was attributed to strong trapping by some defects produced by the plasma exposure and remained quite longer during the storage, while the latter was released from the surfaces by diffusion. T surface activity measured on the plasma-exposed surface changed in a complicated way with time due to removal of T by isotopic replacement with H in ubiquitous H2O and T supply from the bulk in the course of the diffusional release.