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Hanford begins removing waste from 24th single-shell tank
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said crews at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., have started retrieving radioactive waste from Tank A-106, a 1-million-gallon underground storage tank built in the 1950s.
Tank A-106 will be the 24th single-shell tank that crews have cleaned out at Hanford, which is home to 177 underground waste storage tanks: 149 single-shell tanks and 28 double-shell tanks. Ranging from 55,000 gallons to more than 1 million gallons in capacity, the tanks hold around 56 million gallons of chemical and radioactive waste resulting from plutonium production at the site.
Jun Wang, Michael L. Corradini, Troy Haskin, Yapei Zhang, Qing Lu, Wenxi Tian, Guanghui Su, Suizheng Qiu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 1 | October 2015 | Pages 25-34
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-96
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To better understand the MELCOR oxidation and degradation models, past work compared the MELCOR model to a CORA experiment (CORA Test 13). These MELCOR analyses specifically focused on fuel bundle heatup and clad oxidation when compared to CORA test data. The comparison allowed the authors to investigate differences between hydrogen generation data and simulation results. Several potential reasons were considered for hydrogen generation rate differences, including MELCOR input power, heat transfer modeling, the clad solid-phase oxidation model, and the gaseous steam diffusion model. This work focuses on the possible uncertainty in the clad oxidation models used in MELCOR. First, the MELCOR nodalization approach for the CORA test was reviewed. Then, the temperature history and spatial variation were examined. One main focus was to consider other clad solid-phase oxidation models to compare the MELCOR models. This was accomplished by developing a separate model, MYCOAC, using MELCOR temperature predictions as input. Finally, the mass transfer resistance of steam diffusion to the clad surface was examined and found to be a small effect. While the Baker-Just solid-phase oxidation model showed better agreement with CORA data at low temperatures, the conclusion in this paper is that the oxidation models are not the major source of uncertainty in hydrogen generation rate differences. Future work will focus on heat transfer modeling of the CORA test.