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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.
Samet Y. Kadioglu, Dana A. Knoll, Cassiano de Oliveira
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 163 | Number 2 | October 2009 | Pages 132-143
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-07
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Coupling neutronics to thermomechanics is important for the analysis of fast burst reactors because the criticality and safety study of fast burst reactors depends on the thermomechanical behavior of fuel materials. For instance, the shutdown mechanism or the transition between supercritical and subcritical states is driven by the fuel material expansion or contraction. The material expansion is due to the temperature gradient that results from fission power. In this paper, we introduce a numerical model for coupling of neutron diffusion and thermomechanics in fast burst reactors. The goal is to have a better understanding of the relation between the reactivity insertion and the thermomechanical response of fuel materials. We perform a nondimensional analysis of the coupled system that provides insight into the behavior of the transient. We also provide a semianalytical solution model to the coupled system for partial verification of our numerical solutions. We studied material behavior corresponding to different levels of reactivity insertion.