Thermal evaluations for mixed organic and nitrate salt drums in interim storage at the WCS Federal Waste Facility
- Savannah River Site (SRS), Aiken, SC (United States). Savannah River National Lab. (SRNL) Environmental Modeling
Waste Control Specialists LLC (WCS) operates the Federal Waste Facility (FWF) in Texas that is licensed to process and store certain types of mixed low-level radioactive waste packages. The specific waste currently housed at WCS includes some of the transuranic (TRU) waste that originated at the DOE Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and are destined for disposal at the DOE Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) facility. The TRU waste within each Standard Waste Box (SWB) was packaged in 55-gallon drums at LANL. Some of the drums contain mixed organic and nitrate salt contents suspected of experiencing a chemical reaction. The drums (up to four drums in a SWB) were then overpacked in a SWB prior to shipment to WCS. In the most common configuration, WCS placed the SWB containing the drums on metal pallets and stored two SWBs into Modular Concrete Canisters (MCCs) in a double stacked array. The MCCs were placed in a staggered array at a segregated area of the FWF and covered with sand to mitigate the heating that occurred when stored above ground on waste pads. The temporary interment is also intended to provide additional containment of the suspect reactive waste to mitigate release of radioactivity in an incident such as that which occurred at WIPP for one such drum. Void space of each MCC was filled with 1-inch pea gravel to facilitate retrievability. Thermocouple probes were placed within each MCC to monitor heat generation from the SWBs and the MCC lids were closed. The primary objective of this analysis was to estimate the heat generation of the SWB drum contents when the SWB package temperature inside the MCC and the FWF ambient temperature were monitored.
- Research Organization:
- Savannah River Site (SRS), Aiken, SC (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC09-08SR22470
- OSTI ID:
- 1501349
- Report Number(s):
- SRNL-STI-2018-00095
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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