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Fusion Science and Technology
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.
H. T. Bach, T. H. Allen, D. D. Hill, P. T. Martinez, R. B. Schwarz, S. N. Paglieri, J. R. Wermer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 54 | Number 1 | July 2008 | Pages 197-201
Technical Paper | Tritium Measurement | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1795
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Before surplus plutonium pits can be decommissioned and converted into metal oxides to be used as reactor fuels, residual tritium must be reduced to an acceptable level. We have developed two analytical methods involving melting and acid dissolution, combined with liquid scintillation counting as a quantitative and sensitive technique for measuring residual tritium in Pu metal. The detection limit, linearity, and reproducibility of these analytical methods must be validated with a series of metal tritide standards. Since there are no commercially available metal tritide standards, we have developed a technique for their synthesis. The synthesis of these low-level metal tritide standards is accomplished by charging cerium powder with a known amount of tritium to form a master cerium tritide alloy and then by aliquoting from this master alloy and diluting with pure cerium powder to form a series of standards with different tritium concentrations. The major difficulty in synthesizing these standards is that the samples contain extremely low levels of tritium, which span over three decades of concentrations. The synthesis technique and initial data obtained for cerium hydride samples will be presented.