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The mission of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology while simultaneously preventing the diversion and misuse of nuclear material and technology through appropriate safeguards and security, and promotion of nuclear nonproliferation policies. To achieve this mission, the objectives of the NNPD are to: Promote policy that discourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and material to inappropriate entities. Provide information to ANS members, the technical community at large, opinion leaders, and decision makers to improve their understanding of nuclear nonproliferation issues. Become a recognized technical resource on nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and security issues. Serve as the integration and coordination body for nuclear nonproliferation activities for the ANS. Work cooperatively with other ANS divisions to achieve these objective nonproliferation policies.
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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.
Dimitar Altiparmakov
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 175 | Number 3 | November 2013 | Pages 239-249
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE12-71
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents an extension of the equivalence principle to allow distributed resonance self-shielding in a multiregion fuel configuration. Rational expansion of fuel-to-fuel collision probability is applied to establish equivalence between the actual fuel configuration and a homogeneous mixture of hydrogen and resonant absorber, which is a commonly used model to calculate library tables of resonance integrals. The main steps in the derivation are given along with the basic physics assumptions on which the presented approach relies. The method has been implemented in the WIMS-AECL lattice code and is routinely used for calculation of CANDU-type reactor lattices. Its capabilities are illustrated by comparison of WIMS-AECL and MCNP results of 238U resonance capture in a CANDU lattice cell. To determine the optimal rational expansion of the fuel-to-fuel collision probability, the calculations were carried out by varying the number of rational terms from one to six. The results show that four terms are sufficient. Further increase of the number of terms affects the computing time, while the effect on accuracy is negligible. To illustrate the convergence of the results, the fuel subdivision is gradually refined varying the number of fuel pin subdivisions from 1 to 32 equal-area annuli. The results show very good agreement with the reference MCNP calculation.
