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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.
Tatsuya Sakurahara, Zahra Mohaghegh, Seyed Reihani, Ernie Kee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 3 | December 2018 | Pages 354-377
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1486159
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nearly half of the U.S. nuclear power plants (NPPs) are in the process of transitioning, or have already transitioned, to a risk-informed, performance-based fire protection program. For this transition, Fire Probabilistic Risk Assessment (Fire PRA) is used as a foundation for fire risk evaluation. To increase realism in Fire PRA by reducing conservative bias, the authors have developed an Integrated Probabilistic Risk Assessment (I-PRA) methodological framework that does not require major changes to the existing plant Probabilistic Risk Assessments (PRAs). The underlying failure mechanism models associated with fire events are developed in a separate module, which can be interfaced and connected to the existing plant PRA. This paper explains the areas of methodological advancements in I-PRA, comparing them with the existing Fire PRA of NPPs. This comparison is further demonstrated in a realistic case study that applies the I-PRA framework to a critical fire-induced scenario at an NPP. The core damage frequency (CDF) for the selected scenario, computed by the I-PRA framework, is compared with the results of the Full Compartment Burn screening method and the existing Fire PRA methodology. Using the I-PRA framework, the CDF for the selected scenario has decreased by a factor of 20 compared with the Full Compartment Burn screening approach and by a factor of 2 compared to the existing Fire PRA methodology based on NUREG/CR-6850 and the subsequent NUREGs that have updated the data and methods for individual steps.