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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.
Yasunori Iwai, Toshihiko Yamanishi, Akihiro Hiroki, Toshiaki Yagi, Masao Tamada
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 54 | Number 2 | August 2008 | Pages 458-461
Technical Paper | Water Processing | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1853
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A solid-polymer-electrolyte (SPE) water electrolyzer for high-level tritiated water was designed for the Water Detritiation System (WDS). Polymeric materials were selected from a main viewpoint of radiation durability to keep their functions beyond ITER-WDS requirement (530kGy). Our selection was Pt + Ir applied Nafion® N117 ion exchange membrane, VITON® O-ring seal and polyimide insulator. A -ray irradiation test of the SPE cell demonstrated the durability of the cell against 530kGy. The electrolyzer is designed to handle around 9TBq/kg of high-level tritiated water. The detritiation of the polymeric materials is thus a critical problem for the maintenance or for the disposal of the electrolyzer. As for the Nafion membrane, most of tritiated water in the membrane was rapidly removed by such as vacuum dehydration. It was difficult, by contrast, to remove bound tritiated water in the membrane. An effective method to remove tritiated water in the bound water is to promote an isotope exchange.