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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.
M. Rozenkevich, Yu. Pak, S. Marunich, A. Bukin, A. Ivanova, A. Perevezentsev, L. Lepetit
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 3 | November 2016 | Pages 435-447
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-153
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper examines the main features of the gas purification process from tritiated water vapor at any relative humidity using water phase isotope exchange. The experimentally evaluated overall mass transfer coefficient (KOG) for structured CY black packing manufactured by SULZER Chemtech (Switzerland) was used as the main performance parameter of the method. The obtained KOG dependencies on various process parameters (temperature, water and gas flows, and their ratio) demonstrate that column operation in adiabatic mode is preferable for the detritiation of gas at any relative humidity. Under comparable conditions, KOG does not depend on the column diameter in the investigated range. A comparison of the main characteristics of the developed technology with those of the technology based on water vapor adsorption on molecular sieves shows clear advantages in terms of energy, operating cost, and detritiation degree with the same amount of tritiated water produced as a radioactive waste.