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Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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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.
Matthew A. Gonzales, Brian C. Kiedrowski, Anil K. Prinja, Forrest B. Brown
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 191 | Number 1 | July 2018 | Pages 1-45
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1442546
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The heavy-gas model with specific energy-dependent absorption cross sections is used to construct analytical, semi-analytical, and numerical free-gas scattering benchmarks for the neutron spectrum, effective multiplication factor k, and temperature coefficient in an infinite, homogeneous medium. The energy dependences considered are piecewise constant, constant plus inverse in energy, and piecewise linear. Analytic forms for k and in terms of hypergeometric functions are obtained for piecewise-constant absorption with two energy ranges and for constant-plus-inverse-in-energy absorption. Analogous semi-analytical integral expressions are obtained for piecewise-linear absorption with two energy ranges. Numerical solutions of a linear system are obtained for piecewise-constant and piecewise-linear absorption for greater than two energy ranges. The heavy-gas model solutions of k are compared with continuous-energy Monte Carlo calculations; the results converge to the heavy-gas model with increasing target mass ratio A, demonstrating the heavy-gas model’s utility as a verification benchmark.