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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.
Yi Xu, Hong Li, Feng Xie, Jianzhu Cao, Jiejuan Tong
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 4 | May 2017 | Pages 671-678
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1290949
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) is one of the six proposed Generation IV reactor concepts. The HTR-10, a 10 MW high temperature gas-cooled reactor was a helium cooled, graphite-moderated, and thermal neutron spectrum reactor. Since tritium (H-3) has an effect on the environment and public radiation dose, it has received more and more attention in the environmental impact assessment of nuclear facilities. Recently, several experiments on source terms in HTR-10 have been run, of which preliminary measurements indicated H-3 was an important nuclide in the primary loop of HTR-10. The production mechanism, distribution characteristic, reduction route, and release type of total H-3 in HTR-10 were analyzed and discussed in this technical note. A theoretical model was established to calculate the total activity of H-3 in the reactor core and activity concentration of H-3 in the primary loop of HTR-10. This model indicated that the majority of total H-3 was produced by ternary fission reactions and H-3 in the primary helium was mainly generated from activation reactions of impurities in the reactor core. The research results can provide useful information for the experimental measurement of H-3 in HTR-10, and promote the study of H-3 in high temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs).