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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.
A. Kryukov, A. Ballesteros, C. Bruynooghe, U. Von Estorff
Nuclear Technology | Volume 180 | Number 3 | December 2012 | Pages 443-449
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the Initial Release of MCNP6 / Materials for Nuclear Systems | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A15355
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents the capabilities of the International Database on Reactor Pressure Vessel (RPV) Materials (the Database) for precise and comprehensive RPV lifetime assessment, aimed at supporting the long-term operation of nuclear power plants. The Database was created in the framework of the International Atomic Energy Agency activities. Fourteen countries, including the United States, France, and Russia, supplied large amounts of surveillance results and data from national and international research programs.The recent achievements and open issues in the area of RPV radiation embrittlement assessment are considered. They concern mainly the effects resulting from long irradiation times and high neutron fluences (neutron flux influence, late blooming phases), nickel and manganese synergism, and further validation of appropriate safety concepts (the Master Curve approach).New information from ongoing surveillance and research programs has to be incorporated into the Database for the most effective RPV radiation embrittlement prediction. These additional data will greatly support the development of embrittlement correlations and embrittlement trend curves valid for long irradiation times.