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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.
Junyong Bae, Jeeyea Ahn, Seung Jun Lee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 7 | July 2020 | Pages 951-961
Technical Paper – Special section on the 2019 ANS Student Conference | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1693215
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Human operators always have the possibility to commit human errors, and in safety-critical infrastructures such as a nuclear power plant, human error could cause serious consequences. Since nuclear plant operations involve highly complex and mentally taxing activities, especially in emergency situations, it is important to detect human errors to maintain plant safety. This work proposes a method to predict the future trends of important plant parameters to determine whether a performed action is an error or not. To achieve this prediction, a recursive strategy is adopted that employs an artificial neural network as its prediction model. Two artificial neural networks were selected and compared: multilayer perceptron and long short-term memory (LSTM). Model training was accomplished using emergency operation data from a nuclear power plant simulator. From the comparison results, it was observed that the future trends of plant parameters were quite accurately predicted through the LSTM model. It is expected that the plant parameter prediction function proposed in this work can give useful information for detecting and recovering human errors.