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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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.
Meihua Zeng, Yong Song, Yunqing Bai, Minghuang Wang, Meisheng He, Jie Yu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 2 | November 2018 | Pages 238-247
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1469349
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The China lead-based research reactor (CLEAR-I) with 10 MW(thermal) will be built for the research of the accelerator-driven subcritical system (ADS) and lead-cooled fast reactor technology. Compared with other reactors, ADS has a spallation target placed in the reactor core center, which affects the refueling motion in the vessel. It is difficult to reach the fuel assemblies near the proton beam tube through the common vertical refueling gripper. In this technical note, a new cantilever-type and internal grasping gripper with defined refueling process was designed to handle all assemblies in CLEAR-I. The static and kinematics analyses of the gripper were carried out by ANSYS Workbench and MATLAB considering the influence of working in air and liquid metal. The structural and kinematic simulation results show that the design of the gripper is feasible for CLEAR-I. It provides an advanced refueling solution for the technical validation of ADS.
