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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.
Yoshiro Asahi, Tomoaki Suzudo, Nobuyuki Ishikawa, Toru Nakatsuka
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 152 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 219-235
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2577
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An analysis of a boiling water reactor turbine trip was performed with the THYDE-NEU code. In spatial kinetics, reactivity was not used since the three-dimensional transient diffusion equation was solved with the implicit direct integration method. The plant was treated as a closed coolant system, and hence, it was necessary to cope with thermal-hydraulic behaviors at pressures as low as the atmospheric pressure. At low pressures, nonlinearity of the thermal-hydraulic equation is enhanced, and hence, a thermal nonequilibrium model is required. To satisfy the measured initial pressure distribution within the reactor, it was necessary to have the moisture separator model and to account for a reversible pressure drop at a junction with a flow area change. Among the parameters in THYDE-NEU is in the thermal nonequilibrium model in addition to C1 and C2 regarding the manner in which to express the coolant density used in the table look-up of cross sections. For a pair of C1 and C2, it is possible to find parametrically a value of , namely, C, so that THYDE-NEU can reproduce the experimental fact that the core-averaged local power range monitor output RAPRM reached 0.95 at 0.63 s to generate a scram signal. One of the calculations with C was compared with the experiment. It was shown that the spatial kinetics results are sensitive to the temporal behavior of the bypass valve opening. Among the assumptions in use, those to be scrutinized before further performing sensitivity calculations were indicated.