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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.
Misaki Sato, Hiromichi Uchimura, Kensuke Toda, Tomonori Tokunaga, Hideo Watanabe, Naoaki Yoshida, Yuji Hatano, Ryuta Kasada, Takuya Nagasaka, Akihiko Kimura, Yasuhisa Oya, Kenji Okuno
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 3 | April 2015 | Pages 551-554
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T77
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The deuterium retention behavior for the Vacuum Plasma Spraying (VPS) tungsten (W) coating was studied to demonstrate the tritium retention as a function of heating temperature. It was found that two major deuterium desorption stages were observed at the temperature regions of 400 - 700 K (Stage 1) and 900 - 1100 K (Stage 2), considering that Stage 1 was linked to the desorption of deuterium trapped by near surface and intrinsic defects, and Stage 2 was related to the desorption of deuterium bound to impurities as C-D bonds. By heating the sample above 673 K, the major peak of C-1s was shifted from C-O bond to C-C bond, where the retention of deuterium as Stage 2 was increased. Therefore it was indicating that the hydrogen isotope retention was controlled by the amount of C-C bond in VPS, most of which was contaminated during the VPS coating process. The comparison of several samples (VPS-W with shading, VPS-W without shading and Polycrystalline W (PCW)) shows that the carbon impurity has a large affinity with deuterium and make stable trapping states compared to that with intrinsic defects and grain boundaries. However, most of them was reduced by heating at 1173 K. Therefore, heating treatment is quite important to get rid of carbon impurities and refrain higher tritium retention in VPS.