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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.
Lei Yue, Chao Chen, Jiamao Li, Chengjian Xiao, Xiulong Xia, Guangming Ran, Xiaolong Fu, Jingwei Hou, Yu Gong, Heyi Wang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 5 | July 2020 | Pages 680-689
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1766274
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Palladium membranes have been used for hydrogen purification for a long time due to their infinite selectivity and excellent permeation performance. However, a coexisting impurity gas, like CO, will inhibit the hydrogen permeation flux that results from the concentration polarization (CP) and competitive adsorption inhibition effects. This work aims to investigate the two inhibition effects separately and quantitatively under different temperatures and pressures. Therefore, permeation experiments of H2 (90%)/N2 (10% to 5%)/CO (0% to 5%) mixtures have been carried out at temperatures ranging from 623 to 698 K and H2 partial pressure drops from 30 to 100 kPa. The permeation of H2/N2 is used to study CP because the competitive adsorption of N2 can be ignored. Then, the further H2 flux reduction of xH2/(1-x-z)N2/zCO permeation relative to that of xH2/(1-x)N2 permeation can be attributed to the competitive adsorption of CO. The experimental results show that the CP effect would be enhanced by increasing temperature and pressure, while the CO competitive adsorption effect would be depressed. Meanwhile, the CO inhibition effect generally becomes smaller when the membrane thickness becomes thicker. Based on the results in this work, operation conditions are suggested to be at a higher temperature and higher pressure for a thicker Pd membrane in consideration of increasing the H2 permeation flux and reducing the CO adsorption effect. The experimental and calculation methods used in this work can provide a new way for investigating the inhibition effect on hydrogen permeation caused by other nonpermeable gases like CO2, Ar, or H2O.
