Open AccessProceedings of the 2nd Annual Tank Integrity Workshop
Author(s) -
M.C. Edelson,
R. B. Thompson
Publication year - 2001
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Reports
DOI - 10.2172/797634
Subject(s) - plutonium , hanford site , waste management , radioactive waste , nuclear weapon , oak ridge national laboratory , savannah river site , environmental science , nuclear fuel cycle , fission products , spent nuclear fuel , high level waste , plutonium 240 , shut down , national laboratory , engineering , fission , plutonium 239 , radiochemistry , nuclear engineering , chemistry , physics , quantum mechanics , political science , neutron , engineering physics , law , nuclear physics
The production of nuclear weapons in the United States to help defeat the Axis Powers in World War II and to maintain national security during the Cold War required the construction of a vast nuclear facility complex in the 1940's and 1950's. These facilities housed nuclear reactors needed for the production of plutonium and chemical plants required to separate the plutonium from fission products and to convert plutonium compounds to pure plutonium metal needed for weapons. The chemical separation processes created ''high-level waste'' that was eventually stored in metal tanks at each site. These wastes and other nuclear wastes still reside at sites throughout the United States. At the Savannah River Site, a facility (the Defense Waste Processing Facility) has been constructed to vitrify stored high-level waste that will be transferred to the national high-level waste repository. The liquid wastes at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory have largely been stabilized as a mixture of oxide particles (calcines) but liquid wastes remain to be treated and the calcined waste will probably require further processing into a final, stable form. The Hanford Site is now in the initial stages of waste treatment facility design and has a large number of single-shell tanks, many of which are known to be leaking into the subsurface. The Oak Ridge Site, which did not produce ''high-level waste'' as defined by DOE, continues to rely upon tank storage for nuclear wastes although most of its older liquid wastes have been successfully stabilized. The site at West Valley, near Buffalo, NY, marks the location of the nation's only commercial fuel reprocessing facility. As a result of an agreement with the state of New York, the DOE assumed a major role in the stabilization of the high-level waste stored at this site and its eventual closure. A feature common to many of these sites is that they must continue to rely upon large underground tanks to store dangerously radioactive wastes and, in many cases, these tanks are at or have already exceeded their design lives. The DOE Tanks Focus Area (TFA) was created in 1996 to help develop new technologies to, in part, measure the integrity of these tanks so that their continued safe use could be assured