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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.
A. Busigin, G. I. D. Williams, T. C. W. Wong, D. Kulczynski, A. Reid
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 54 | Number 2 | August 2008 | Pages 333-336
Technical Paper | Tritium in Fission | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1825
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Ontario Power Generation Nuclear (OPGN) has a 4 x 880 MWe CANDU nuclear station at its Darlington Nuclear Division located in Bowmanville. The station has been operating a Tritium Removal Facility (TRF) and a D2O station Upgrading Plant (SUP) since 1989. Both facilities were designed with a Distributed Control System (DCS) and programmable logic controllers (PLC) for process control. This control system was replaced with a DCS only, in 1998. A dynamic plant simulator was developed for the Darlington TRF (DTRF) and the SUP, as part of the computer control system replacement. The simulator was used to test the new software, required to eliminate the PLCs. The simulator is now used for operator training and testing of process control software changes prior to field installation. Dynamic simulation will be essential for the ITER isotope separation system, where the process is more dynamic than the relatively steady-state DTRF process. This paper describes the development and application of the DTRF and SUP dynamic simulator, its benefits, architecture, and the operational experience with the simulator