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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.
M. R. Gilbert, S. Zheng, R. Kemp, L. W. Packer, S. L. Dudarev, J.-Ch. Sublet
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 9-17
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-751
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A key goal for fusion materials modelling research is the development of predictive simulation models and capabilities to assess material performance under the neutron irradiation conditions expected in near-plasma regions of fusion reactor tokamaks. This paper presents computational results from the modelling of neutron fields in the latest concepts for the next-step demonstration fusion reactor, DEMO. In particular, the variation in neutron exposure as a function of coolant choice and tritium-breeding blanket concept are described, and the calculated neutron spectra are then applied to predict damage rates, helium production rates, and helium-induced grain-boundary embrittlement lifetimes—updating previous estimates derived using an earlier DEMO model.