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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.
Hattan Natto, Haori Yang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 9 | September 2022 | Pages 1382-1392
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2035478
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Cherenkov detectors have been developed and used in several fields since the discovery of Cherenkov radiation. They do have several advantages compared with other detector types, such as low noise due to the low-energy threshold of Cherenkov radiation and short decay constant (on the order of picoseconds). However, the light yield of Cherenkov detectors is low. Only several hundreds of Cherenkov photons can be generated per megaelectron-volt. The objective of this work is to manufacture and test Cherenkov glass detectors for detection of high-energy gammas. The focus is to improve the light output of Cherenkov detectors by implementing wavelength shifting (WLS) fibers inside the glass samples. Without the WLS materials, most Cherenkov photons are likely to be absorbed within the glass sample before they can reach the photon sensor. WLS fibers do not directly increase the number of Cherenkov photons, but they can reduce the energy of Cherenkov photons and direct them toward the photon sensor. This photon energy reduction helps increase the efficiency of light collection and improves matching between the photon wavelength and photon detector quantum efficiency.