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DNFSB spots possible bottleneck in Hanford’s waste vitrification
Workers change out spent 27,000-pound TSCR filter columns and place them on a nearby storage pad during a planned outage in 2023. (Photo: DOE)
While the Department of Energy recently celebrated the beginning of hot commissioning of the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP), which has begun immobilizing the site’s radioactive tank waste in glass through vitrification, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board has reported a possible bottleneck in waste processing. According to the DNFSB, unless current systems run efficiently, the issue could result in the interruption of operations at the WTP’s Low-Activity Waste Facility, where waste vitrification takes place.
During operations, the LAW Facility will process an average of 5,300 gallons of tank waste per day, according to Bechtel, the contractor leading design, construction, and commissioning of the WTP. That waste is piped to the facility after being treated by Hanford’s Tanks Side Cesium Removal (TSCR) system, which filters undissolved solid material and removes cesium from liquid waste.
According to a November 7 activity report by the DNFSB, the TSCR system may not be able to produce waste feed fast enough to keep up with the LAW Facility’s vitrification rate.
H. Huang, R. B. Stephens, S. A. Eddinger
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 1 | January 2011 | Pages 39-45
Technical Paper | Nineteenth Target Fabrication Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST59-39
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High image resolution ([approximately]1.3 m/pixel) and precision positioning capability make the Xradia X-ray microscopy an attractive platform on which to study X-ray opacity variations. It can complement precision radiography (PR) as an instrument with much higher spatial resolution. PR measures X-ray transmission intensity variations down to 0.01% at 100-m resolution. Since the requirement to differentiate minute lateral variations in X-ray transmission intensity scales inversely with the spatial resolution, an X-ray imaging microscope such as the Xradia MicroXCT can be useful if it measures the transmission intensity variations to <1%. In normal practice, a number of imaging artifacts limit the intensity measurement to only [approximately]2% precision. Such artifacts include the thermal drift and the illumination uniformity of the X-ray source, as well as thickness variations in the scintillator plate and the beryllium X-ray tube window. The conventional flat-fielding technique is not effective against the dynamic interaction between the beryllium window texture and the moving shadow cast by a moving X-ray spot. We have modified the image processing routine so that the lateral variations in the transmitted intensity can be measured to [approximately]0.3% precision on low-Z samples. This technique can be used to record microstructure variations in beryllium samples. Currently, the beryllium microstructures are characterized by ultrasmall angle X-ray scattering on a synchrotron source, which is not commonly accessible, is expensive, and has a long turnaround time. This Xradia-based method has the potential to make it a routine measurement.