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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.
Ara Go, Daesik Yook, Kyuhwan Jeong, GyeongMi Kim, GunHee Jung, Ser Gi Hong
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 4 | April 2019 | Pages 605-623
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1500795
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Basic Plan for High-Level Radioactive Waste Management (national WM plan) was established and promulgated, taking into consideration national and international trends on policy and technology development. In order to evaluate the safety for a facility in accordance with the national WM plan, it is essential to evaluate the spent nuclear fuel (SNF) source term. The objective of this study was to analyze Korea SNF characteristics; to propose reference SNF; and to evaluate generation amounts, radioactivity, thermal power, and isotopic composition of SNF in compliance with the national WM plan in order to provide basic information for safety research in Korea. The Automatic Multi-batch ORIGEN Runner for Evaluation of Spent fuel program (AMORES) was developed and used to evaluate inventory, radioactivity, and thermal power. Generation amounts, radioactivity, thermal power, and isotopic composition of SNF for milestones in the national WM plan were evaluated using a pressurized water reactor SNF database (DB) through 2015, and future SNF generation was estimated by taking into consideration the distribution of initial enrichment and burnup for each power plant unit. As a result, radioactivity, thermal power, and isotopic composition at each site in 2015, 2052, and 2082 differed significantly depending on the presence of new nuclear power plants. In addition, a reference SNF was proposed through statistical analysis of the SNF DB in order to utilize it for safety analysis based on various scenarios when actual SNF data cannot be available. In order to perform a more realistic safety assessment, radionuclide inventories using reference SNF and time-integrated SNF nuclide inventories using actual data were compared, and then, the best-fit reference SNF for each site and year was suggested.