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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.
Eri Kanamori
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 9 | September 2021 | Pages 1442-1455
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1865028
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The purpose of this paper is to show that the responsibility of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, Inc. (TEPCO) was “economized” in the wake of the accident. It is argued that responsibility for the nuclear accident was mainly linked to economic responsibility, and that social and moral responsibility were consequently obscured by the financial accounting that followed the accident. This paper also proposes that the responsibility for the accident should not be limited to TEPCO, but that the responsibility of the nuclear industry and regulatory bodies should be more strongly emphasized in order to prevent such accidents in the future. These conclusions are consistent with some of the literature that emerged following the Fukushima accident. The theoretical framework is derived from sociological studies on quantification and accounting literature on economizing. TEPCO’s accounts, the special business plans of TEPCO and the Nuclear Damage Compensation and Decommissioning Facilitation Corporation, and documentation from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry are the main sources that are consulted in this paper.