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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.
Charles Erwin Cohn
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 5 | Number 5 | May 1959 | Pages 331-335
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE59-A25605
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experimental investigation was made of the statistical fluctuations in neutron intensity which occur in a nuclear reactor. An ion chamber was exposed to reactor flux, and the fluctuations in its output current were analyzed in a tunable bandpass filter to get the frequency spectrum of these fluctuations, which has the shape of the square modulus of the transfer function. Results are presented of some measurements made on various low-power experimental reactors at Argonne National Laboratory. For reactors with prompt neutron lifetime between 15 and 70 μsec, the quantity l/β was determined within 5 per cent or better from a least squares fit to the transfer function thus measured.