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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.
Tom Burr, Michael S. Hamada
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 177 | Number 3 | July 2014 | Pages 307-320
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-86
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The time series of material balances in nuclear material accounting (NMA) is also known as the material unaccounted for (MUF) sequence. This paper applies a joint cusum test to residual time series from NMA that arise from either of two options. The first residual series is the standardized, independently transformed MUF (SITMUF) sequence that relies on an estimate of Σ, the MUF covariance matrix. The second residual series arises from using either time series modeling or nonparametric smoothing on the MUF sequence and ignores the estimate of Σ. Assuming that the MUF sequence is multivariate Gaussian and ignoring estimation error in Σ, we find the anticipated result that the first option is superior to the second option. In addition, we find that the SITMUF scheme in the first option is robust to modest estimation error in Σ over a large number of idealized facilities, but not necessarily so for any specific idealized facility. These two findings provide a perspective on previous literature that addressed a perceived weakness in NMA.