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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.
Paul W. Humrickhouse, Brad J. Merrill
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | September 2015 | Pages 295-302
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-941
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It is envisioned that tritium will be extracted from DCLL blankets using a vacuum permeator. We derive here an analytical solution for the extraction efficiency of a permeator tube, which is a function of only two dimensionless numbers: one that indicates whether radial transport is limited by the PbLi or by the solid membrane, and another that is the ratio of axial and radial transport times in the PbLi. The permeator efficiency is maximized by decreasing the velocity and tube diameter, and increasing the tube length. This is true regardless of the mass transport correlation used; we review several and find that they differ little, and the choice of correlation is not a source of significant uncertainty here. The PbLi solubility, on the other hand, is a large source of uncertainty, and we identify upper and lower bounds from the literature data. Under the most optimistic assumptions, we find that a ferritic steel permeator operating at 470 °C will need to be about twenty times larger in volume than previous conceptual designs using niobium and operating at higher temperatures.