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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.
Ioana R. Cristescu, I. Cristescu, Ch. Day, M. Glugla, D. Murdoch
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 659-666
Technical Paper | The Technology of Fusion Energy - Tritium, Safety, and Environment | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1564
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
During plasma operation of ITER in the DT phase, tritium will be distributed in the different subsystems of the fuel cycle; tritium inventories within the systems are not constant, but vary as the gas moves through these systems during the burn and dwell periods. To evaluate the tritium content in each sub-system of the fuel cycle of ITER, a dynamic model for tritium inventory calculation was developed. The code reflects the design of each system in various degrees of detail; both the physical processes characteristics and in some cases the associated control systems are modeled. The amount of tritium needed for ITER operation has a direct impact on the tritium inventories within the fuel cycle subsystems. As ITER will function in pulses, the main characteristics that influence both the maximum value of tritium inventories in the systems and the rapid tritium recovery from the fuel cycle as necessary for refueling are discussed. Eventually the inventories in the Isotope Separation System (as the system with the highest tritium inventory) for short and long pulses and their dependence on the packing molar inventory are presented.