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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.
Kyoung M. Kang, Michael L. Corradini
Nuclear Technology | Volume 196 | Number 3 | December 2016 | Pages 511-523
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-157
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work proposes a model to explain concrete anisotropic ablation by corium during a molten core–concrete interaction (MCCI). As a result of recent MCCI prototypic material experiments, core-concrete interaction (CCI) tests, and VULCANO tests, one observes that concrete ablation behavior consistently depends on the concrete materials used in the experiments. Specifically, tests with limestone-common-sand (LCS) concrete yielded isotropic concrete ablation, i.e., equal axial and radial concrete erosion. This is in comparison to anisotropic ablation in tests with siliceous (SIL) concrete, where radial ablation was much larger than axial ablation. This was an unexpected result because prior results of many MCCI simulant experiments indicated that nearly isotropic ablation was expected in prototypic material experiments regardless of concrete type. A new phenomenological model is proposed in this work based on a hypothesis that unifies the result of both previous simulant and prototypic material experiments, i.e., heat transfer area enhancement and delayed gas release caused by the presence of unmelted solid aggregate material that enters the molten pool. This model offers a logical and phenomenological explanation concerning anisotropic ablation as well as the capability to simulate anisotropic ablation. This model is implemented into the CORQUENCH code as part of this work. Comparisons of these simulation results obtained with this new model to the CCI experiments for cases with SIL concrete and anisotropic ablation show better agreement with the test data than the existing model.