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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
Beate Bornschein, Uwe Besserer, Markus Steidl, Michael Sturm, Kathrin Valerius, Jürgen Wendel, KATRIN Collaboration
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 3 | April 2017 | Pages 231-235
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2016.1273703
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
By an international collaboration the KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino experiment KATRIN is currently being installed and commissioned at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the site selection that makes sure of the unique expertise and infrastructure of Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK). KATRIN requires a strong windowless gaseous source of almost pure molecular tritium (95%) and a throughput of 40 g tritium (1.5·1016 Bq) per day, stabilized to the 0.1% level. Since the last large components have been delivered in summer 2015, the collaboration is now focusing on the commissioning of the whole KATRIN experiment. A particular challenge is the commissioning with tritium, which will mark the point of no return regarding the contamination of the large magnet cryostats and tritium loop components. We have developed a 5-phase plan that covers all necessary work to be done for the safe and reliable standard tritium operation of KATRIN.