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DNFSB spots possible bottleneck in Hanford’s waste vitrification
Workers change out spent 27,000-pound TSCR filter columns and place them on a nearby storage pad during a planned outage in 2023. (Photo: DOE)
While the Department of Energy recently celebrated the beginning of hot commissioning of the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP), which has begun immobilizing the site’s radioactive tank waste in glass through vitrification, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board has reported a possible bottleneck in waste processing. According to the DNFSB, unless current systems run efficiently, the issue could result in the interruption of operations at the WTP’s Low-Activity Waste Facility, where waste vitrification takes place.
During operations, the LAW Facility will process an average of 5,300 gallons of tank waste per day, according to Bechtel, the contractor leading design, construction, and commissioning of the WTP. That waste is piped to the facility after being treated by Hanford’s Tanks Side Cesium Removal (TSCR) system, which filters undissolved solid material and removes cesium from liquid waste.
According to a November 7 activity report by the DNFSB, the TSCR system may not be able to produce waste feed fast enough to keep up with the LAW Facility’s vitrification rate.
Ming-Shih Lu, Theodor Teichmann
Nuclear Technology | Volume 102 | Number 2 | May 1993 | Pages 196-209
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT93-A34817
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The error characteristics of both high-resolution gamma spectroscopy and high-level neutron coincidence (HLNC) measurements, separate or combined, are discussed as they apply to nondestructive analysis of plutonium-bearing materials. Expressions have been derived to estimate the overall variance in the 240Pu effective mass and in the total plutonium mass in terms of the specific contributions from uncertainties in the measurements, the pertinent physical variables (including isotopics and impurities), and the instrumental constants. Experimental data available in the published literature have been used to illustrate the error characteristics of the HLNC and the effects of isotopic error correlations associated with materials having different burnups.
