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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.
Florent Heidet, Ehud Greenspan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 171 | Number 1 | May 2012 | Pages 13-31
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-114
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One objective of the present work is to determine the minimum burnup (BU) required to sustain a breed-and-burn (B&B) mode of operation in a large 3000-MW(thermal) sodium-cooled fast reactor core fed with depleted uranium-based metallic fuel. Another objective is to assess the feasibility of using the fuel discharged at the minimum required BU for fabricating the starter of an additional B&B core without separation of actinides and most of the solid fission products. A melt-refining process is used to remove gaseous and volatile fission products and to replace the cladding when it reaches its 200 displacements per atom radiation damage limit. Additional objectives are to assess the validity of a simplified zero-dimensional (0-D) neutron balance analysis for determination of the minimum BU required and the maximum BU attainable in a B&B mode of operation and to apply this 0-D methodology to assess the feasibility of establishing a B&B mode of operation in fast reactor cores made of different combinations of fuels, coolants, and structural materials.It is found that the minimum BU required to sustain the B&B mode in the referenced depleted uranium-fueled B&B reactor is 19.4% FIMA. The number of excess neutrons that can be generated by the fuel discharged at 19.4% FIMA is found sufficient to establish the B&B mode in another B&B core. The net doubling time for starting new B&B reactors with fuel discharged from operating B&B reactors is 12.3 yr.The minimum BU required to sustain the B&B mode of operation in alternative core designs was found to be 29% FIMA when using Pb-Bi coolant with metallic uranium fuel and 40% FIMA when using nitride fuel with sodium coolant. The B&B mode of operation cannot be established using thorium fuel and liquid-metal coolant.The results derived from the neutron balance analysis strongly depend on the value of the estimated neutron leakage probability and the fraction of neutrons lost in the reactivity control systems. A neutron balance performed using a simplified 0-D core model, although not accurate due to, primarily, inaccurate spectra predictions, provides reasonable estimates of the minimum required and the maximum attainable BUs despite the fact that its k evolution prediction is inaccurate. The 0-D approach can save much computational effort and time and is found to be useful for scoping analysis.