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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.
Bojan Petrovic, Marco Ricotti, Stefano Monti, Nikola Cavlina, Hisashi Ninokata
Nuclear Technology | Volume 178 | Number 2 | May 2012 | Pages 126-152
Technical Paper | Small Modular Reactors / Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A13555
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents an overview of the first 10 years of the IRIS project, summarizing its main technical achievements and evaluating its impact on the resurgence of small modular reactors (SMRs). SMRs have been recurrently studied in the past, from early days of nuclear power, but have never gained sufficient traction to reach commercialization. This situation persisted also in the 1990s; the focus was on large reactors based on the presumed common wisdom of this being the only way to make the nuclear power plants competitive. IRIS is one of several small reactor concepts that originated in the late 1990s. However, the specific role and significance of IRIS is that it systematically pursued resolving technology gaps, addressing safety, licensing, and deployment issues and performing credible economics analyses, which ultimately made it possible - together with other SMR projects - to cross the "skepticism threshold" and led the making of a convincing case - domestically and internationally - for the role and viability of smaller reactors. Technologically, IRIS is associated with a number of novel design features that it either introduced or pursued more systematically than its predecessors and ultimately brought them to a new technical level. Some of these are discussed in this paper, such as the IRIS Safety-by-Design, security by design, the innovative thermodynamic coupling of its vessel and containment, systematic probabilistic risk assessment-guided design, approach to seismic design, approach to reduce the emergency planning zone to the site boundary, active involvement of academia, and so on. Many individuals and organizations contributed to that work, too many to list individually, and this paper attempts to pay tribute at least to their collective work.