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Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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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.
Hiroaki Suzuki, Masanori Naitoh, Atsuo Takahashi, Marco Pellegrini, Hidetoshi Okada
Nuclear Technology | Volume 186 | Number 2 | May 2014 | Pages 255-262
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-42
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, mark the start of the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Progression of the accident has been analyzed with the SAMPSON code. SAMPSON was originally designed as a large-scale simulation system with the maximum use of mechanistic models and theoretically based equations. In the progression analysis done for Unit 2, SAMPSON could reproduce the pressure transient of the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) reasonably well by assuming partial load operation of the reactor core isolation cooling system (RCIC). The pressure transient of the primary containment vessel was reproduced reasonably well by assuming torus room flooding. After the RCIC trip and manual opening of the steam relief valve, SAMPSON predicted the damage to the upper part of the fuel assemblies near the core center and RPV failure due to creep rupture. More than 91 wt% of the core debris relocated to the lower plenum was as particles, and the major constituents were UO2, Zr, and ZrO2 by SAMPSON analysis.