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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.
S. C. Xiao, Z. Zhou, Jing Zhao, Y. Yang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 3 | September 2013 | Pages 592-598
Nuclear Systems: Analysis and Experiments | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 2) Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-582
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, a light water cooled fusion-fission hybrid reactor blanket fueled with thorium and uranium is presented. The major objective is to study the feasibility of this new concept with multi-purposes, including high energy gain, tritium self sufficiency and 233U breeding. The basic logic of this concept is to use the excess neutrons generated in the natural uranium fuel region to breed 233U in the thorium fuel region, while maintaining high energy amplifying factor (M) and tritium self-sufficiency. The guiding principle for the blanket design is to obtain a good neutron economy. The main method is to maximize the available neutrons and optimally distribute them in the blanket via competing processes of fission, tritium breeding and fissile fuel breeding by adjusting the neutron spectrum and system geometry. The COUPLE code developed by INET of Tsinghua University is used to simulate the neutronic behavior in the blanket. The simulation results show that a combined soft and hard neutron spectrum could yield M>15 while maintaining TBR>1.10 and conversion ratio of fissile materials (including 239Pu and 233U) CR>1.0 in a reasonably long refueling cycle (about 5 years). The results also demonstrates that under the constraint condition of tritium self sufficiency, this water cooled concept can only reach one optimized purpose at one time, energy gain M or 233U breeding.