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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.
Luka Snoj, Ivan Kodeli, Igor Remec
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 178 | Number 4 | December 2014 | Pages 496-508
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-30
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A complete evaluation of the experimental uncertainties of the KRITZ-2 series of critical and relative fission rate experiments was performed within the International Reactor Physics Experiment Evaluation Project. The uncertainties in the benchmark model keff are mainly due to uranium enrichment, plutonium content [mixed oxide (MOX) fuel], pitch, and boron isotopic composition. The largest contribution to the uncertainty in the benchmark model keff is from the uncertainty in the bias due to the homogenization of the particulate MOX fuel. In addition, uncertainties due to nuclear data libraries are presented. The keff's calculated with various nuclear data libraries systematically underpredict the benchmark model keff by one to three times the standard experimental uncertainties. When taking into account uncertainties in nuclear data estimated using SCALE-6.0 and JENDL-4.0m covariances, the benchmark and calculated keff's agree within 1σ of the total—experimental plus calculational—uncertainties. In contrast to the criticality benchmark data, the calculated relative fission rates agree very well with the experimental ones, especially when eliminating systematic errors due to normalization.