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Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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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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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.
J. W. Lane, J. M. Link, J. M. King, T. L. George, S. W. Claybrook
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 7 | July 2020 | Pages 1019-1035
Regular Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1698896
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
GOTHIC™ has been used to simulate the Experimental Breeder Reactor–II (EBR-II) Shutdown Heat Removal Test 17 (SHRT-17) and Shutdown Heat Removal Test 45R (SHRT-45R), which correspond to protected and unprotected loss-of-flow events, respectively. GOTHIC is a versatile general-purpose, thermal-hydraulic software package that is a hybrid between traditional system thermal-hydraulic and computational fluid dynamics codes. It is a practical engineering tool that has been used for the design and licensing of existing plants, small modular reactors (SMRs), and next-generation plant designs. Historically, the software has been applied for containment analysis and operability assessments for light water reactors (LWRs), but the recent improvements included in GOTHIC 8.3(QA) allow for the software to be used to simulate advanced, non-LWR concepts currently being developed such as sodium, molten salt, lead, and gas–cooled designs.
It will be demonstrated in this paper that GOTHIC includes both the required attributes to model EBR-II and the appropriate physics to accurately simulate the steady-state operating conditions as well as SHRT-17 and SHRT-45R. The GOTHIC model of EBR-II was developed using only publicly available information. The nodalization was selected not only to capture the important phenomena but also to remain computationally efficient. The GOTHIC results show good agreement in both magnitude and trend with the experimental data. Differences are within the bounds of experimental uncertainty and required engineering assumptions applied in the model to fill in gaps in information, particularly for the various leakage paths that existed throughout the primary side of EBR-II, and were not well characterized during the tests.