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Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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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.
Tomohiko Yamamoto, Atsushi Katoh, Yoshitaka Chikazawa, Hiroyuki Hara
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 12 | December 2020 | Pages 1875-1890
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1726155
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To respond to seismic and other natural hazard events, designers of the Japan Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (JSFR), an advanced loop-type reactor, are planning to adopt a steel-plate reinforced concrete structure reactor building and an advanced seismic isolation system to strengthen this building. The design changes have been initiated by lessons learned from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (Fukushima I NPP) accident. These enhancements to the design are to ensure that the JSFR structure can withstand external hazards and a severe accident. This evaluation and countermeasure study of external hazards and severe accident response by JSFR are based on the JSFR design before the Fukushima I NPP accident (2010 JSFR design).
The method to evaluate the influence of external hazards on the JSFR design has applied Japanese codes and standards to show that the 2010 JSFR design of the building can withstand external hazards without additional countermeasures. And, for extreme conditions, few countermeasures are needed; however, the countermeasures considered have limited impact on the JSFR design because they do not significantly change the reactor building design.
This paper gives a detailed evaluation of the countermeasures for the external hazards and severe accidents that could impact the JSFR building.