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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.
Jari Laarni (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1620-1630
People are prone to use various kinds of cognitive heuristics to simplify decision making especially in demanding situations. Sometimes, these heuristics expose them to failures in judgement, which may lead to errors. Even though these kind of failures are also possible in process industries, there is little research on the effect of cognitive biases on process control and maintenance work. In the present paper, we provide suggestions of how heuristics and biases may appear in these tasks in nuclear domain. Overall, our observations suggest that operative and maintenance personnel may be prone to commit biases also in nuclear domain. We have reviewed existing literature on the effect of cognitive biases in NPP incidents and accidents, and we describe some of the most well-known biases and give examples of their application for decision making in nuclear domain. We have also analyzed failures and problem situations in a simulator study conducted in a Finnish NPP. A small set of failures of judgement could be identified in which some forms of cognitive biases may have manifested themselves. The present paper is one of the first systematic reviews on effects of cognitive heuristics and biases among operative and maintenance personnel in NPPs and ways to prevent them. Our next step would be to analyze more systematically a set of cognitive errors specific to operative and maintenance activities in nuclear domain in order to identify occurrences of cognitive biases and illusions in them.