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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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After decades, Hanford’s WTP begins vitrifying tank waste
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management and its contractor Bechtel announced on October 15 the start of nuclear vitrification operations at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP), also known as the Vit Plant, at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
W. M. Lopez, J. R. Beyster
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 12 | Number 2 | February 1962 | Pages 190-202
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE62-A26058
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutron diffusion parameters in water have been measured at 26.7°C with the pulsed neutron technique. The results are 210 ± 1 µsec for the neutron mean lifetime, 37,503 ± 366 cm2 sec−1 for the average diffusion coefficient, and 5116 ± 776 cm4 sec−1 for the diffusion cooling constant. From these values the thermal absorption cross section of hydrogen and the thermal diffusion length in water can be inferred to be 325 ± 2 mb and 2.83 ± 0.02 cm, respectively. With a pulsed high-intensity neutron source provided by an electron linear accelerator, neutron lifetime measurements were performed on small and large water samples with values of the geometrical buckling from 0.014 cm−2 to 0.59 cm−2. Effects of harmonic modes in the large water geometries, which were determined by measurements of the time-dependent spatial flux distributions resulting from an external pulsed source of fast neutrons, were found to be adequately predictable with simple diffusion theory.