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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.
Yang Liu, Nam Dinh
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 1 | January-February 2019 | Pages 81-99
Technical Paper – Selected papers from NURETH 2017 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1512790
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two-fluid model-based multiphase computational fluid dynamics (MCFD) has been considered one of the most promising tools to investigate a two-phase flow and boiling system for engineering purposes. The MCFD solver requires closure relations to make the conservation equations solvable. The wall boiling closure relations, for example, provide predictions on wall superheat and heat partitioning. The accuracy of these closure relations significantly influences the predictive capability of the solver. In this paper, a study of validation and uncertainty quantification (VUQ) for the wall boiling closure relations in the MCFD solver is performed. The work has three purposes: (1) to identify influential parameters to the quantities of interest (QoIs) of the boiling system through sensitivity analysis (SA), (2) to evaluate the parameter uncertainty through Bayesian inference with the support of multiple data sets, and (3) to quantitatively measure the agreement between solver predictions and data sets. The widely used Kurul-Podowski wall boiling closure relation is studied in this paper. Several statistical methods are used, including the Morris Screening method for global SA, Markov Chain Monte Carlo for inverse Bayesian inference, and confidence interval as the validation metric. The VUQ results indicate that the current empirical correlations-based wall boiling closure relations achieved satisfactory agreement on wall superheat predictions. However, the closure relations also demonstrate intrinsic inconsistency and fail to give consistently accurate predictions for all QoIs over the well-developed nucleate boiling regime.