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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.
V. I. Vysotskii, V. D. Rusov, T. N. Zelentsova, M. V. Vysotskyy, V. P. Smolyar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 716-729
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2147389
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper discusses the physical and mathematical foundations and possible applications of the intensity correlation method for spatial three-dimensional (3-D) positional detection (finding the 3-D spatial position) of distant γ-ray or neutrino sources in real time or after a set of registered events. This method is based on the correlation of intensities of event sequences measured by several spaced-apart distant detectors. A specific consideration is made of the possibility of using a correlation intensities method for the analysis of the processes within a nuclear reactor, for the search of the hypothetical intra-terrestrial georeactor (planetocentric nuclear fission reactors), for the optimization of the method of single-photon-emission-computed tomography in medicine, and for other applications. The conditions of successful applications of the intensity correlation method for these systems are determined. The main problem with this method is connected to a relatively low count rate of registered neutrino events.