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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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College students help develop waste-measuring device at Hanford
A partnership between Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) and Washington State University has resulted in the development of a device to measure radioactive and chemical tank waste at the Hanford Site. WRPS is the contractor at Hanford for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.
L. Trotignon, P. Thouvenot, I. Munier, B. Cochepin, E. Piault, E. Treille, X. Bourbon, S. Mimid
Nuclear Technology | Volume 174 | Number 3 | June 2011 | Pages 424-437
Technical Paper | TOUGH2 Symposium / Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A11750
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Simulations of atmospheric carbonation of concrete intermediate-low level waste cell components were conducted to evaluate potential chemical degradations affecting these components during the operating period of a radioactive waste repository in a deep Callovo-Oxfordian clay layer. Two-phase liquid water-air flow is combined with gas components diffusion processes, leading to a progressive drying of the concrete and an array of chemical reactions affecting the cement paste. The carbonation process depends strongly on the progression of the drying front inside the concrete, which in turn is sensitive to the initial water saturation and to nonlinear effects associated with permeability and tortuosity phenomenological laws.Results obtained with a modified version of ToughReact-EOS4 to represent realistic tortuosity evolution of materials with clogging and saturation are presented and commented upon. Strong porosity clogging of the carbonated concrete is not observed in the simulations; slight porosity opening is in general predicted, except for high initial liquid saturation of the concrete, in which case a moderate porosity reduction is found. Carbonation depths on the order of 0.6 to 1.1 × 10-3 myr-1 are predicted for cementitious components. However, these values are probably overestimations both in depth and intensity of carbonation. The model of cement drying needs some revision to correctly weight diffusion control in the discretized representation of the cement/air boundary. Also, the kinetic model of mineral reactivity needs improvements with respect to the influence of liquid saturation on reaction rates, which are actually strongly decreased in dry materials, and with respect to the protective effect of secondary carbonates.