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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.
A. A. Yukhimchuk, A. S. Khapov, I. P. Maksimkin, V. V. Baluev, I. E. Boitsov, A. V. Vertey, S. K. Grishechkin, V. G. Kiselev, I. L. Malkov, R. K. Musyaev, V. V. Popov, D. T. Sitdikov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 3 | April 2015 | Pages 662-665
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T105
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The article presents results of comparative tests for determination of deuterium fluxes permeating through walls of austenitic stainless steel AISI304 (DIN 1.4301) chamber and Al2O3 based ceramic F99.7 chamber. Both chambers represent a piece of Ø26x Ø22x117 mm3 tube with spherical bottom ending. It is shown that at 773 K and deuterium pressure of 1200 mbar the permeated deuterium flux through the stainless steel chamber constituted 8∙10-5cm3/s, while the flux through ceramic one it did not exceed the sensitivity of the measurement method threshold, namely ~1.5∙10-7cm3/s. The ceramic chamber turned out to survive more than 103 cycles of heating up to 773 K with no damages. It did not lose its impermeability up to 10 bar of internal deuterium pressure. The authors also present test results of a prototype bed for reversible tritium storage. The bed’s case was made of alumina based ceramic F99.7, titanium being used as tritide making metal and high frequency induction used for heating of tritide metal.