Challenges with vitrification of Hanford High-Level Waste (HLW) to borosilicate glass – An overview

By A. Goel, J. McCloy, R. Pokorný, A. Kruger. 2019

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The Hanford site in Washington State houses ~56 million gallons of radioactive wastes stored in 177 underground tanks. The waste must be immobilized and permanently stored, and the plan is to separate the tank wastes into low activity waste (LAW) and high-level waste (HLW) streams. The U.S. Department of Energy is building a Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant at Hanford site to separately vitrify these two waste streams in borosilicate glass using Joule-heated ceramic melters (JHCM). Although the process of nuclear waste vitrification seems to be well established, in practicality, it is faced with complex problems starting from the design of glass compositions, to processing in melters and long-term performance of the final vitrified waste forms. The article presents an overview of our current understanding of critical challenges related to the development and performance of HLW glasses.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Ceramics and Composites, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cb19aaf8e1a694001e29c0d4548ae4f9e01b5c9f