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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.
J. J. Jarrell, R. A. Joseph III, R. M. Cumberland, G. M. Petersen (ORNL), E. A. Kalinina (SNL)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 639-646
The potential development and deployment of a standardized canister system represents an opportunity for an integrated approach to address the storage, transportation, and disposal issues in an integrated waste management system (IWMS). However, this deployment has the potential for significant system-wide impacts regardless of timing and method of implementation. This paper describes an evaluation that investigates using standardized, triple-purpose (storage, transportation, and disposal) canisters within the IWMS. Specifically, this evaluation documents a quantitative comparison of the impacts of implementing standardized canisters against the status quo of continuing to load existing canisters that could be challenging to dispose of in a number of different geologic repository concepts being considered by the US Department of Energy. This evaluation focuses on spent nuclear fuel that (1) would be loaded into standardized canister systems at reactors or (2) would be transported to an interim storage facility in reusable, bolted-lid transportation casks and subsequently loaded into standardized canister systems. Specifically, the evaluation builds on previous work to gain a better understanding of (1) the impacts of leaving spent fuel pools open for extended periods of time to facilitate access to the fuel and (2) how updated concepts of packaging for disposal and associated costs impact the system-wide evaluation.
For all standardized canister scenarios analyzed, the following observations can be drawn from this evaluation:
(1) Beginning to load standardized canisters either before or when a repository concept is selected would reduce the total life cycle cost of the system by between 1% and 7% when compared with the current “business as usual” approach of continuing to load large, dual-purpose canisters (DPCs), assuming that disposal of DPCs is determined to be unfeasible.