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Division Spotlight
Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
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.
C. W. Forsberg, J. D. Stempien, M. J. Minck, R. G. Ballinger
Nuclear Technology | Volume 194 | Number 3 | June 2016 | Pages 295-313
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-87
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fluoride salt–cooled High-temperature Reactors (FHRs) are a new type of power reactor that delivers heat to the power cycle between 600°C and 700°C. The FHR uses High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (HTGR) graphite-matrix coated-particle fuel with failure temperatures of 1650°C. The FHR coolants are clean fluoride salts that have melting points above 350°C and boiling points above 1400°C. This combination may enable the design of a large FHR that will not have significant fuel failure and thus radionuclide releases to the environment even in a beyond-design-basis accident (BDBA) that include failure of all cooling systems, the vessel, and containment systems. A first effort has been undertaken to understand FHR BDBAs and develop an FHR BDBA system to prevent major fuel failure if an accident occurs in a large FHR.
Four design features limit BDBA fuel temperatures to lower than fuel failure temperatures. First, there is a large temperature drop to transfer decay heat from the fuel to the environment in a BDBA. Second, the large temperature difference between normal operating temperatures and fuel failure temperatures allows the use of increasing temperatures in an accident to degrade the insulation system and other barriers that prevent efficient transfer of decay heat from the reactor core to the environment in an accident. Third, the silo around the reactor vessel contains a BDBA salt that in an accident heats up, melts, and partly floods the silo to improve heat transfer from fuel to the environment. Fourth, the fuel and coolant retain fission products and actinides at high temperatures.