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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.
Joshua A. Hubbard, Timothy J. Boyle, Ethan T. Zepper, Alexander Brown, Taylor Settecerri, Joshua L. Santarpia, Nelson Bell, Joseph A. Zigmond, Steven S. Storch, Brenda J. Maes, Nicole D. Zayas, Dora K. Wiemann, Marissa Ringgold, Fernando Guerrero, Xavier J. Robinson, Gabriel A. Lucero, Laura J. Lemieux
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 1 | January 2022 | Pages 137-153
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1880255
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Solid waste samples consisting of shredded cellulose, coated with either mesoparticles of metallic salts or dried metal nitrate (lutetium, ytterbium, or depleted uranium) solutions, were generated to mimic solid nuclear waste. After burning these samples, the masses of the aerosolized metal cations were quantified by leaching them from air filters and analyzing the leachate with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. The airborne release fractions (ARFs) for Lu and depleted uranium nitrates were 1 × 10−4, and 3 × 10−3 for Lu and depleted uranium mesoparticle salts, respectively. Uncertainties in ARFs were approximately 10% for the metal nitrates and 30% for the metallic mesoparticles. These data are most applicable to waste materials with 1% metal mass loading where the initial respirable fraction of contaminant particles is one. ARFs were consistent across the two metals, but there was an order of magnitude difference with respect to the physical and chemical form (mesoparticle salt versus nitrate). Cellulose combustion literature indicates that combustion pathways were likely affected by off-gassing and endothermic decomposition reactions. In comparison to ARF values from DOE-HDBK-3010-94, “Airborne Release Fractions/Rates and Respirable Fractions for Nonreactor Nuclear Facilities,” this dataset was consistent with previous results but provides a well-characterized and reproducible method for doping cellulosic materials with nuclear waste surrogates to serve as a baseline for future experimental and computational works.