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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
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.
David Gandy, Craig Stover (EPRI), Hongqing Xu, Vernon Pence (NuScale Power), Steven Lawler, Matthew Cusworth (Nuclear AMRC)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 372-379
Many of the same manufacturing/fabrication technologies that were employed for light water reactors (LWR) plants built 30-50 years ago are also being employed today to build advanced light water reactors (ALWRs). Manufacturing technologies have not changed dramatically for the nuclear industry even though higher quality production processes are available which could be used to significantly reduce overall component manufacturing/fabrication costs. New manufacturing/ fabrication technologies that can accelerate production and reduce costs are vital for the next generation of plants (Small Modular Reactors (SMR) and GEN IV plants) to assure they can be competitive in today’s and tomorrow’s market.
This project has been assembled to demonstrate and test several of these new manufacturing/ fabrication technologies with a goal of producing critical assemblies of a 2/3rds scale SMR reactor pressure vessel (RPV). Through use of technologies including: powder metallurgy-hot isostatic pressing, (PM-HIP), electron beam welding, diode laser cladding, bulk additive manufacturing, advanced machining, and elimination of dissimilar metal welds (DMWs), EPRI, the US Department of Energy, and the UK-based Nuclear-Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (Nuclear-AMRC) (together with a number of other industrial team members) will seek to demonstrate the hypothesis that critical sections of an SMR reactor can be manufactured/fabricated in a timeframe of less than 12 months and at an overall cost savings of >40% (versus today’s technologies). Major components that will be fabricated from PM-HIP include: the lower reactor head, upper reactor head, steam plenum, steam plenum access ports and covers, and upper transition shell.
The project aims to demonstrate and test the impact that each of these technologies would have on future production of SMRs, and explore the relevance of the technologies to the production of ALWRs, SMRs, GEN IV, Ultra-supercritical fossil, and supercritical CO2 plants. The project, if successful, may accelerate deployment of SMRs in both the USA and UK, and ultimately throughout the world for power production.