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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.
Joshua Wheeler, Ted Worosz, Seungjin Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 190 | Number 3 | June 2015 | Pages 215-224
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-69
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Understanding the effects of spacer grids on the coolant flow through a nuclear reactor core is required for best-estimate design and analysis of the plant. The impact of a spacer grid on two-phase flows is of particular importance because the geometric effects of the grid can alter the two-phase flow structure and, consequently, the mass, momentum, and energy transfer characteristics. Therefore, a scaled separate-effects test facility is constructed to investigate the effects of a spacer grid on the hydrodynamics of air-water two-phase flow through a rod bundle. The test facility is scaled to maintain hydrodynamic and geometric similarity to single- and two-phase flows in a conventional pressurized water reactor and to facilitate detailed local measurements of two-phase flow parameters around the simulant fuel rods with a four-sensor conductivity probe. This paper presents measurements of local time-averaged two-phase flow parameters acquired upstream and downstream of the spacer grid with the conductivity probe in a representative subchannel of a 1×3 rod bundle for eight flow conditions. Characteristic features of the development of the two-phase flow parameters along the test section are discussed.