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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.
Hideo Hirayama
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 124 | Number 2 | October 1996 | Pages 258-270
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE96-A28576
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The effects of using different photon cross-section libraries and energy-absorption coefficients on the gamma-ray point isotropic exposure buildup factors up to 40 mean free path (mfp) were studied using the EGS4 Monte Carlo code for water‚ iron, and lead from the 0.1- to 10-MeV energy regions., Differences due to the cross sections used exist‚ but are small‚ < 10%, except those for lead at 0.1 and 10 MeV. The differences in the case of lead increase along with an increase in the depth and are nearly 30% at 40 mfp depth. The effects of using different energy-absorption coefficients of air are <2%
