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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
Bo-Young Han, Hee-Sung Shin, Ho-Dong Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 182 | Number 3 | June 2013 | Pages 369-377
Technical Note | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A16986
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Pyrochemical processing (pyroprocessing) was developed to recover plutonium that is inherently comingled with minor actinides, uranium, and fission products and has been studied with the aim of recovering actinide elements from spent nuclear fuel. Although a significant amount of attention has been given to pyroprocessing technology as a future fuel recycling system, safeguards approaches are challengeable because of a lack of international experience with safeguarding pyroprocessing facilities beyond those at a pilot scale. Safeguards have primarily depended on nuclear material accountancy with the measurement uncertainties inherent in nuclear material flow. When the weakness of nuclear material accountancy is addressed, the quantity of material unaccounted for (MUF) is generally regarded as an important measure of the safeguardability of a facility. Statistically, the observed MUF is a random variable that is an estimate of the true MUF because the observed MUF is affected by measurement errors. The MUF uncertainty can be calculated by properly combining the random error and systematic error of the nuclear material accounting measurement. Therefore, in this study, a conceptual design for estimation of the uncertainty of MUF that can occur in a reference pyroprocessing facility (REPF) is developed, where REPF is a model used to optimize the safeguardability of a future pyroprocessing facility.