Dr. Cory Trivelpiece
Senior Engineer
Savannah River National Laboratory

Abstract

The only operating high-level waste (HLW) glass melter operating in the United States today is located at the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) at the Savannah River Site (SRS). There are currently 35 million gallons of nuclear waste containing 249 MCi of radioactivity stored in underground tanks at SRS. The waste is composed of by-products from the processing of nuclear materials for national defense, research, medical programs, and outer space missions. Today, scientists and engineers from the Savannah River National Laboratory are putting science to work by developing and maintaining methods to permanently dispose of this legacy material while protecting the nation’s security and environment. This talk will explore HLW generation, processing waste into a vitrified waste form (glass), and issues surrounding the long-term disposal of HLW glass. The question of why glass was chosen as the nation’s preferred material for high level nuclear waste encapsulation will be answered. In addition, the science of glass corrosion will be discussed as it pertains to the long-term storage of nuclear waste over centuries to millennia.

Biography

Dr. Cory Trivelpiece is a senior engineer at the Savannah River National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering in 2010 from the Pennsylvania State University with a thesis focus on nanoengineered glasses for high resolution neutron imaging. After graduating with his doctorate, Dr. Trivelpiece joined the faculty of the Materials Research Institute at Penn State where his research interest turned to glass corrosion and radiation detector materials. In 2016, he joined the Chemical and Environmental Sciences Directorate of SRNL in the Immobilization Technology group. In this position, Dr. Trivelpiece leads applied research efforts related to nuclear waste processing, waste form engineering, fundamental glass science and glass process modeling. He was awarded SRNL’s Laboratory Director’s Early Career Award in 2017 for his work on revising the processing models that control nuclear waste glass production at the Defense Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site. He also is the Immediate Past Chair of the Nuclear and Environmental Technology Division of the American Ceramic Society.

His current research focuses on glass process modeling and glass durability, in particular, understanding the fundamental reactions that occur at the glass/solution interface in aqueous systems. This work has implications in a variety of fields ranging from the long-term storage of high-level nuclear waste glass to reverse engineering ancient Roman concrete.