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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.
L. Bosland, L. Cantrel, N. Girault, B. Clement
Nuclear Technology | Volume 171 | Number 1 | July 2010 | Pages 88-107
Technical Paper | Radioisotopes | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A10774
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the case of a hypothetical severe accident in a nuclear power plant, iodine is one of the fission products of major importance. It may be present in various gaseous forms that could be released to the environment, impacting population health. In such a case, the amount released (the so-called "source term") has to be estimated in order to help the safety authorities protect the population from radiological consequences. This estimation is one of the main objectives of the Accident Source Term Evaluation Code (ASTEC) that is developed jointly by the French Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) and the German institute Gesellschaft für Anlagen- und Reaktorsicherheit. ASTEC is composed of various modules able to model the nuclear reactor behavior during an accident. One of these modules, named IODE, predicts iodine behavior in the reactor containment. It is able to model the kinetics of about 35 chemical reactions and mass transfer processes. IODE is validated against separate effect tests, semi-integral experiments, and integral experiments. This paper presents the experimental phenomena that would take place in reactor containment in the case of a severe accident. Then, IODE is used to model the experimental gaseous concentration of organic and inorganic iodine in the PHEBUS FPT-2 test carried out by IRSN. The comparison of experimental data and the modeling show a general good agreement for inorganic iodine even if some differences are evidenced. For organic iodides the modeling is not satisfying. These differences might be explained by the deficiencies of some models and by some assumptions that still have to be validated by dedicated experiments.