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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.
B. B. Cipiti, P. P. H. Wilson, P. Phruksarojanakun, L. A. El-Guebaly
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 731-738
Technical Paper | The Technology of Fusion Energy - Nonelectric Applications | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1577
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Sandia National Laboratories has initiated a scoping level design of a sub-critical transmutation reactor driven by Z-Pinch fusion. The baseline design is able to burn up 1,280 kg of actinides per year while at the same time producing 3,000 MWth. The fusion driver required for this application is 20 MW, or a 200 MJ target fired once every 10 seconds. This paper discusses how a fusion actinide burner can fit into the nuclear fuel cycle.
