Vitrification of High Active Waste. Vitrification Techniques

摘要

The main stream of high level radioactive materials generated as wastes by the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel is composed of fission products solutions. The storage of these liquids has been operated until now in stainless steel tanks almost everywhere. From a general standpoint, it is now assumed that these solutions, in which long-life actinides are also present, must be solidified owing to the hazards related to a long term disposal. Vitrification has generally been taken more into consideration than other processes owing to a relatively simple implementation and mainly because glass is a medium flexible enough to house the various elements bound to be present in the radioactive liquids without inducing drastic changes in the physicochemical properties. Among these properties particular attention is paid to the ones connected to the fabrication: corrosiveness, volatilization, viscosity as well as to the interim storage and long term disposal: thermal stability, chemical stability versus beta lt. slash and chemically bond irradiation including the subsequent effects of helium build up. Investigations in those fields have been carried out principally on borosilicate and aluminoborosilicate glasses. The manufacture techniques under development are numerous. Some of them are continuous processes, other are batch ones. Both can involve either a one stage or a two stage fabrication. The most advanced technique is a 2 stages continuous process involving calcination in a rotary tube and vitrification in a metallic melter. (Atomindex citation 14:765004)