Recent Process Improvements to Increase High Level Waste Throughout at the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF)

摘要

The Savannah River Sites (SRS) Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF), the worlds largest operating high level waste (HLW) vitrification plant, began stabilizing about 35 million gallons of SRS liquid radioactive waste by-product in 1996. As of April 2006, over two million gallons of radioactive waste with about ten million curies of activity have been vitrified into about eight million pounds of radioactive glass and poured into over 2000 canisters. During the initial DWPF operation, the nominal targeted waste loading for the glass was about 28%. Several process improvements were made, including the use of an insert in the melter pour spout that doubled canister production rates by lowering down time due to plugging of the pour spout by an erratic glass pour stream. Recent improvements include: glass former optimization, glass waste loading increases, melter heated bellows liner, and glass surge protection software implementation. The rest of this paper discusses these improvements and their impact on increasing waste throughput. Sludge preparation changes have also occurred but are not part of this discussion.