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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.
Akira Shibata, Yoshiaki Kato, Taketoshi Taguchi, Masatoshi Futakawa, Katsuhiro Maekawa
Nuclear Technology | Volume 196 | Number 1 | October 2016 | Pages 89-99
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT16-54
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Zircaloy-4 has been widely used as a nuclear fuel cladding material. However, recently, several European countries have gradually replaced Zircaloy-4 cladding material in pressurized water reactor (PWR) nuclear power plants with a Zr-Nb alloy called M5 and other new zirconium alloys with Nb added that are expected to have relatively longer operating lives. Although improved corrosion resistance of the advanced zirconium alloys was demonstrated in various conditions, the origin of this resistance has not yet been elucidated. In this study, corrosion tests were performed on Zircaloy-4 and M5 under simulated PWR water conditions to explore the origin of the better corrosion resistance of the advanced zirconium alloys. Alloy specimens were exposed to simulated PWR conditions, and the increase in oxide film content was analyzed by weight gain and microscopy observations. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) was performed on Zircaloy-4 and M5 in the pretransition period of oxide film to compare their corrosion properties. The EIS results obtained in this study show that the electrochemical behavior of M5 is significantly different from that of Zircaloy-4 in the early period of the initial stage in the pretransition oxidation process. To explain the result, a multilayer circuit model is assumed. The resistance of the diffusion layer comprising multiple layers restricts the rate of oxidation in the M5 response system. The occurrence of this process caused by multilayered oxide film would contribute to improved corrosion resistance of M5 under PWR water conditions.