70 Materials Problems with Temporary and Permanent Storage of high-level nuclear wasters.pdf

PART VI Special Topic: Materials Problems with Temporary and Permanent Storage of High-Level Nuclear Wastes /U Materials Problems with Temporary and Permanent Storage ?i* of High-Level Nuclear Wastes M. A. STRETCHER Wilmington, Delaware, USA A. INTRODUCTION This chapter provides an overview of materials failures and leaks of high-level radioactive weapons waste in welded, mostly 3,800,000-L (1,000,000-gal) carbon steel tanks at the Hanford, Washington, site. Newer, improved double-shell tanks developed at the Savanna River Site, South Carolina, have prevented leaking into the ground. The waste in several hundred tanks at both sites will be concentrated and converted into borosilicate glass. Waste converted into glass in now being poured into stainless steel canisters at the Savannah River Plant for eventual permanent placement into an underground repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, along with assemblies of spent nuclear fuel from 116 commercial nuclear power plants from ~ 50 different sites. Both the canisters and fuel assemblies are to be placed in cylindrical metal containers, or waste packages. The requirements for corrosion resistance of canisters and waste packages have been increased by the discovery of unexpected amounts of water in an exploratory 8-km (5-mile) tunnel in Yucca Mountain. Highly radioactive wastes from 50 years of production of plutonium for nuclear weapons are being stored in numerous carbon steel (CS) tanks at both the Hanford Site in Richland, Washington, and the Savannah River Plant (SRP) near Aiken, South Carolina. The Hanford Site is in the eastern part of the state where the Snake River flows into the Columbia River, as the Columbia turns from south to west. The SRP is situated at the river forming the border between South Carolina and Georgia. These two sites are by far the largest facilities of their kind in the United States. At both plants, the tanks are mostly 3.8 million-L (1 million-gal), 23- to 26-m diameter, 11-m high (75- to