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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.
M. A. Alammar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 70 | Number 1 | July 1985 | Pages 111-119
Technical Paper | Third International Retran Meeting / Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33669
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Oyster Creek Generating Station is a 1930-MW(thermal) boiling water reactor 2 plant. During the past year, a program to qualify the Oyster Creek RETRAN model against plant data was in effect at GPU Nuclear. As part of this program, a major transient that occurred on May 2, 1979, was chosen for analysis comparison. While operating at 100% power, a spurious high-pressure scram occurred, coupled with a simultaneous trip of the recirculation pumps. Other events resulted in a loss of feedwater flow and the inadvertent closure, by the operator, of the recirculation pump discharge valves, which limited recirculation flow to only five 0.0508-m (2-in.) bypass lines. The operator proceeded to isolate the vessel and use the emergency condensers for decay heat removal until feed flow was restored 45 min later. The plant RETRAN model was benchmarked against this transient for the first 45 min, using 39 volumes, 54 junctions, 25 heat conductors, and a bubble rise model for the separator/upper downcomer regions. The RETRAN results showed good agreement with plant data for downcomer level and dome pressure. The unique coupling between the downcomer and core zone liquid levels during the cyclic operation of the emergency condensers was simulated quite well. The use of the bubble rise model for the separator/ upper downcomer, however, resulted in a higher dome pressure given by RETRAN, which is believed to be due to the 100% separation efficiency of the model as compared to the degraded separator efficiencies at off-optimum operating conditions. The fuel zone liquid level was an outstanding issue at the time where a conservative simple calculation showed that the core remained covered during the transient. The RETRAN model confirmed that, but also showed that the fuel zone liquid mass during the transient was more than that at steady state. The good agreement obtained against plant data verifies the adequacy of the RETRAN code and the Oyster Creek model for performing transient and accident analyses. Recently, a RELAP5 model has also provided a benchmark for the same transient, and a good comparison with RETRAN and plant data was obtained.