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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 S. Peck, Tushar K. Ghosh, Mark A. Prelas
Nuclear Technology | Volume 184 | Number 3 | December 2013 | Pages 351-363
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A24991
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The sulfur-iodine and hybrid-sulfur thermochemical cycles that can utilize high-temperature heat from advanced nuclear reactors have shown promise economically for large-scale production of hydrogen from water. Both of these cycles employ a step to decompose sulfuric acid to sulfur trioxide by heating it above 723 K followed by the catalytic decomposition to sulfur dioxide at a temperature >1073 K depending on the catalyst used. Successful commercial implementation of these technologies is dependent on the development of suitable materials for use in these highly corrosive environments. In this study, a laboratory-scale superheater/decomposer was constructed and used to study the corrosion resistance of natural diamond, synthetic diamond films treated with boron and titanium, silicon carbide, quartz, aluminum nitride, INCONEL, and platinum to sulfuric acid and SO3. However, it appeared that some of these materials catalyzed SO3 to SO2 and O radicals, which also attacked these materials, increasing their corrosion rates.Natural diamonds, synthetic diamond films (treated with boron and titanium), aluminum nitride, and INCONEL have unacceptable corrosion rates above 873 K. Both the boron- and titanium-treated diamond samples completely disintegrated at temperatures >973 K. The high corrosion rates may have resulted from carbons in diamond having a higher preference for oxygen free radicals that were formed during the decomposition process. Oxygen free radical concentrations increased as a function of the increasing temperature.The present study showed that silicon carbide had the best corrosion resistance over the range of conditions at which the superheater would operate. Quartz was also corrosion resistant but became brittle after 30 h of exposure to this harsh environment. Platinum, used as a catalyst to reduce the decomposition temperatures, exhibited almost no corrosion when exposed to decomposition products. However, platinum did corrode when exposed to liquid sulfuric acid at high temperatures.