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Immobilisation process for contaminated zeolitic ion exchangers from Fukushima

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2017

D. Pletser ,
R. K. Chinnam ,
M. Kamoshida  and
W.E. Lee
D. Pletser*
Affiliation:
Centre for Nuclear Engineering, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ London,United Kingdom
R. K. Chinnam
Affiliation:
Centre for Nuclear Engineering, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ London,United Kingdom
M. Kamoshida
Affiliation:
Center for Technology Innovation – Energy, Research & Development Group, 7-2-1Omika-cho, Hitachi-shi, Japan
W.E. Lee
Affiliation:
Centre for Nuclear Engineering, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ London,United Kingdom
*
*(Email: [email protected])
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Abstract

The clean-up of the Fukushima Daiichi site, after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, continues to generate large amounts of spent adsorbents. These adsorbents need to be disposed of permanently in a low temperature immobilisation process to avoid volatilising radioactive Cs and Sr species. To this end an immobilisation process with a maximum temperature of 600 °C was developed by sintering model waste with glass frit to form a dense Glass Composite Material (GCM) wasteform. A zeolitic model wasteform, chabazite, was sintered with a lead borosilicate glass composition at a maximum temperature of 600 °C. The sintering process was optimised with various thermal treatment steps to ensure that volatile species, aqueous or otherwise, were released before full sintering to yield a dense final wasteform. With this process dense wasteforms of up to 40 wt. % chabazite have been achieved.

Keywords

sinteringnuclear materialszeolite
Type
Articles
Information
MRS Advances , Volume 1 , Issue 62: Scientific Basis for Nuclear Waste Management XXXIX , 2016 , pp. 4089 - 4094
Copyright
Copyright © Materials Research Society 2017 

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