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The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
Pradeep Ramuhalli, Surajit Roy, Jangbom Chai
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 182 | Number 2 | February 2016 | Pages 228-242
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-127
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes research toward developing prognostics technologies for light water nuclear power reactor components. The focus of this paper is on passive components (those that do not need to change state or move to perform their function), although the technologies are applicable to other classes of components as well. A prototypic failure mechanism (high-cycle fatigue) is used to focus the efforts and provide context for the development effort. A Bayesian framework is proposed for the prognostics of remaining useful life and applied to simulated data sets representing nondestructive measurements of high-cycle fatigue damage. The initial results of the prognostics based on simulated data sets are presented.