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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.
Delgersaikhan Tuya, Toru Obara
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 5 | May 2019 | Pages 481-494
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1540209
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A multiregion integral kinetic (MIK) code based on the integral kinetic model and a Monte Carlo neutron transport method has been developed with a new time-dependent feedback modeling capability. The current MIK code is applicable to the supercritical power transient following reactivity insertion in a fissile system of arbitrary geometry and composition, taking its feedback mechanisms into account. The new time-dependent feedback modeling capability allows a more direct and accurate treatment of complicated and nonlinear feedback mechanisms in a given system. The purpose of this study is to verify the MIK code and its time-dependent feedback modeling capability through various supercritical transient experiments conducted at the Godiva, TRACY, and SILENE facilities. Specifically, four supercritical experiments were selected and simulated using the MIK code. The various complicated feedback mechanisms—thermal expansion in Godiva, and Doppler broadening, thermal expansion, and radiolytic gas creation in TRACY and SILENE—provide a good benchmark for verifying the MIK code and its time-dependent feedback model. The obtained results show generally good, albeit occasionally poor, agreement with experimental results depending on the specific experiment. When the reasons for the poor agreement are considered, however, it may be concluded that the simulated results show promising agreement with the experiments, verifying the MIK code and its time-dependent feedback modeling capability.