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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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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.
B. A. Vermillion et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1139-1142
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A839
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We are performing research and development to increase production quantity and yield for Inertial Fusion Energy targets for laser fusion. A key component of the laser fusion target is an approximately 4 mm diameter foam shell. To facilitate large-scale production, research into optimization of foam shell gelation and hardening times to reduce non-concentricity of the foam shell is underway. Additionally, we are examining methods to modify the current laboratory bench scale process for initial foam shell formation, various fluid exchanges, and sealcoat chemistry into a continuous process in collaboration with Schafer Corporation. The proposed process utilizes porous tubing sections to perform fluid exchanges in a long (200 m-1 km) continuous path of tubing extending from the triple orifice generator currently used to encapsulate and form the foam shell.Real-time process control has been applied to the triple orifice generator to control the diameter of the foam shell. The system makes use of a pair of photodiode sensors in a closed loop feedback control system incorporating a variable speed process pump. Empirical results indicate the process control loop is capable of identifying wet shell diameters to an approximate standard deviation of 80 to 90 m, on par with characterization results indicating true shell diameter standard deviations of 30-80 m.