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Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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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.
J. F. Lebrat, G. Aliberti, A. D'Angelo, A. Billebaud, R. Brissot, H. Brockmann, M. Carta, C. Destouches, F. Gabrielli, E. Gonzalez, A. Hogenbirk, R. Klein-Meulenkamp, C. Le Brun, E. Liatard, F. Mellier, N. Messaoudi, V. Peluso, M. Plaschy, M. Thomas, D. Villamarín, J. Vollaire
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 158 | Number 1 | January 2008 | Pages 49-67
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE05-100
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The MUSE-4 program is a series of zero-power experiments carried out at the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique Cadarache MASURCA nuclear facility from 2001 to 2004 to study the neutronics of accelerator-driven systems (ADSs). The program has investigated the coupling of a multiplying medium to neutron sources of 2.6 or 14 MeV provided by an accelerator (GENEPI) via D(d,n)3He or T(d,n)4He nuclear fusion reactions, respectively. The fuel was UO2-PuO2, the simulated coolant was sodium or lead, and the multiplication factor keff ranged from 1 to 0.95. The aim of the experiment was to develop new measurement techniques specific to ADSs and to test the performances of neutronic calculations codes for such systems.The interpretation of the MUSE-4 experiment has shown that the physical parameters of the system are globally well reproduced by calculations performed with the ERANOS code system, which proves good agreement with both the measurements and the reference Monte Carlo calculations; this concerns the critical mass, the delayed neutron fraction, the fission rate shapes, and the spectral indices. This is a particularly remarkable issue for ERANOS and its associated libraries, which had never been tested for such situations.Concerning the nuclear data, JEF-based cross sections provide a better agreement on critical mass than other libraries. A sensitivity of several measured parameters to the elastic and inelastic cross section of lead have been demonstrated, and possible biases on these cross sections have been indicated.We have shown that several methods based on deterministic or stochastic calculations allow us to relate the experimental neutron population decay after a source pulse with the reactivity of the system; these reactivity determination techniques are in good agreement with standard reactivity measurement techniques.