ITP.FOR: A code to calculate thermal transients in High Level Waste Tanks

Abstract

A variety of processing operations for high level radioactive waste occur in the High Level Waste Tanks in the H-Area of the Savannah River Site. Thermal design constraints exist on these processes, principally to limit the amount of corrosion inhibitor which must be added to protect the tank and cooling coil materials. The required amount of corrosion inhibitor, which must subsequently be removed prior to trapping the waste in borosilicate glass, increases exponentially with temperature over a fairly narrow range (some tens of degrees Celsius). For this reason, there is a need to model the thermal-hydraulic processes occurring in the waste tanks. A FORTRAN computer code, called ITP.FOR, was written to provide a simple but reasonably accurate analysis tool for plant operation design. The code was specifically written to model Tank 48, in which the In-Tank Precipitation (ITP) process of precipitating radioactive cesium will be initiated. Although the ITP.FOR code was written as personal-use software for scoping design calculations for Tank 48, the current intent is to extend the code`s applicability to other H-Area waste tanks, and to certify the code in accordance with the NRTSC Quality Assurance requirements for critical-use software (1Q-34, 1991). Since the code`s capabilities have generatedmore » some interest to date, the present report is presented as interim documentation of the code`s mathematical models. This documentation will eventually be supplanted by the formal documentation of the expanded and benchmarked code.« less