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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.
Young Ho Chae, Poong Hyun Seong (KAIST), Jung Taek Kim (KAERI)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 957-966
The operating condition of secondary loop of nuclear power plant has the characteristics that are vulnerable to flow accelerated corrosion phenomena. Because of the flow accelerated corrosion, from 1970 to 2012, in the world 1987 number of events were occurred. [1] Nuclear power plant utilities try to estimate the flow accelerated corrosion induced wall thinning by using CHECWORKS code. CHECWORKS code is based on empirical test results of the pipes. Therefore, CHECWORKS code can only estimate the pipe, which has empirical test result. However, in reality, extract the whole test result from the secondary system is almost impossible. Therefore, for the pipes which are not listed on the CHECWORKS code, ultrasonic measurements were conducted during the maintenance period. For the ultrasonic measure, the insulators in the secondary system should be removed therefore, the measure entails huge works. To overcome this issue, Jung Taek Kim et al. [2] focused on the change of pipes' vibration characteristic due to wall thinning effect. By using vibration signal, pipes thinning condition can be diagnosed in online. Jung Taek Kim used Fourier Transform to analyze vibration characteristics. However, pipes' vibration change was too tiny to classify the differences. By using pre-trained wall thinning classifier, we tried to find possible vibration characteristic. To generate vibration mode, generative adversarial network model is used. After the several training sequences, the generator which is the part of the generative adversarial network imitate vibration data. By combining pre-trained diagnosis network and generator, unknown vibration characteristics may be found. In this study, to estimate pipes' thinning condition several machine learning algorithms (Support vector machine, Convolutional neural network, and Long-short term memory network) were reviewed and applied. Each algorithms were trained by using pipes' vibration signal. As a results, LSTM network shows best classification performance. And also, several vibration modes were imitated by using generative adversarial network.
