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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.
E. Denisov et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 54 | Number 2 | August 2008 | Pages 493-496
Technical Paper | Materials Interactions | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1861
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The tritium trick technique was used to build-up radiogenic helium inside stainless steel 12Cr18Ni10Ti (SS). A great quantity of defects with a mean diameter of 20 nm, most probably platelet-like bubbles with 3He atoms, was observed in 3He-containing samples. The mean density of these bubbles in SS samples containing ~75 appm of 3He is estimated to be 61020 m-3. Much larger helium bubbles were observed in SS after annealing the samples at T1170 K. Thermal release of radiogenic helium occurs at T>1500 K. The presence of 3He in structural materials causes the formation of an additional state for hydrogen sorption.