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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.
Oleg Roderick, Mihai Anitescu, Paul Fischer
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 164 | Number 2 | February 2010 | Pages 122-139
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE08-79
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work we describe a polynomial regression approach that uses derivative information for analyzing the performance of a complex system that is described by a mathematical model depending on several stochastic parameters.We construct a surrogate model as a goal-oriented projection onto an incomplete space of polynomials; find coordinates of the projection by regression; and use derivative information to significantly reduce the number of the sample points required to obtain a good model. The simplified model can be used as a control variate to significantly reduce the sample variance of the estimate of the goal.For our test model, we take a steady-state description of heat distribution in the core of the nuclear reactor core, and as our goal we take the maximum centerline temperature in a fuel pin. For this case, the resulting surrogate model is substantially more computationally efficient than random sampling or approaches that do not use derivative information, and it has greater precision than linear models.