Due to increasingly stringent sulfur emission regulations, improvements are necessary in the modified Claus process. A recently proposed model by Nasato et al. for the Claus plant waste heat boiler (WHB) is improved by including radiative heat transfer, which yields significant changes in the predicted heat flux and the temperature profile along the WHB tube, leading to a faster quenching of chemical reactions. For the WHB considered, radiation accounts for approximately 20% of the heat transferred by convection alone. More importantly, operating the WHB at a higher gas mass flux is shown to enhance reaction quenching, resulting in a doubling of the predicted hydrogen flow rate. This increase in hydrogen flow rate is sufficient to completely meet the hydrogen requirement of the H2S recovery process considered, which would eliminate the need for a hydrogen plant.