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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.
Michael Epstein, Hans K. Fauske, Wison Luangdilok
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 3 | September 2011 | Pages 520-528
Technical Paper | NURETH-13 Special / Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12503
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It is well known that under certain circumstances a mixture of coarse, hot (molten) drops in water that forms from pouring a hot melt into water explodes. This so-called "steam explosion" is generally believed to involve fine fragmentation of the melt drops induced by steam bubble collapse and concomitant water vaporization on a timescale that is short compared with the steam pressure relief time. Motivated by a previously published idea that rapid solidification would render uranium oxide (UO2)-containing (corium) melt drops stiff and resistant to the fragmentation induced by steam bubble collapse that is requisite for an explosion, here we combine solidification theory with an available theory of the stability of thin, submerged crusts subject to acceleration to predict the "cutoff time" beyond which melt drop fragmentation is suppressed by crust cover rigidity. Illustrative calculations show that the cutoff time for corium melt drops in water is a fraction of a second and probably shorter than the time it takes to form the coarse-premixture configuration of melt drops in water that is a prerequisite for an explosion, while the opposite is true for the molten aluminum oxide (Al2O3)-water system for which the window of opportunity for an explosion is predicted to be several seconds. These theoretical findings are consistent with previous experiments that revealed molten UO2 or corium pours into water to be nonexplosive and produced steam explosions upon pouring molten Al2O3 into water.