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Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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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.
Shiping Wei, Xinyu Sun, Haixia Wang, Jiangtao Jia, Zhibin Chen, Shichao Zhang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 7 | October 2020 | Pages 869-877
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1777668
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) tritium plant has to deal with a larger amount of tritium than ITER. The tritium source term is one of the key issues for safety assessment and operation of the CFETR. In this technical note, the preliminary estimation and safety analysis of the tritium source term for the CFETR tritium plant in normal operation have been performed on compliance with the ongoing plant design. The estimation method adopted is the system dynamics simulation performed by the Tritium Analysis program for fusion System developed by the Frontier Development of Science (FDS) team. The preliminary analysis results show that the storage and delivery system still stores the most amount of tritium. Until after 1 month of operation the plasma-facing material needs to be cleaned in the CFETR corresponding to the 600-g limit. Tritium losses, such as tritium permeation into the coolant and release to building rooms, are of a much smaller amount than tritium decay in the 2-week operation. It is worth noting that the tritium concentration somewhere in the tritium plant can be slightly more than 1 DAC (derived air concentration). These preliminary analysis results could provide some valuable references for the safety design and tritium management of the CFETR tritium plant.