DEVELOPMENT OF ELECTROREFINER WASTE SALT DISPOSAL PROCESS FOR THE EBR II SPENT FUEL TREATMENT PROJECT英文文献.pdfVIP

DEVELOPMENT OF ELECTROREFINER WASTE SALT DISPOSAL PROCESS FOR THE EBR- II SPENT FUEL TREATMENT PROJECT MICHAEL F. SIMPSON and PRATEEK SACHDEV Idaho National Laboratory P.O. Box 1625 Idaho Falls, ID 83415 *Corresponding author. E-mail : michael.simpson@inl.gov Received February 19, 2008 The results of process development for the blending of waste salt from the electrorefining of spent fuel with zeolite-A are presented. This blending is a key step in the ceramic waste process being used for treatment of EBR-II spent fuel and is accomplished using a high-temperature v-blender. A labscale system was used with non-radioactive surrogate salts to determine optimal particle size distributions and time at temperature. An engineering-scale system was then installed in the Hot Fuel Examination Facility hot cell and used to demonstrate blending of actual electrorefiner salt with zeolite. In those tests, it was shown that the results are still favorable with actinide-loaded salt and that batch size of this v-blender could be increased to a level consistent with efficient production operations for EBR-II spent fuel treatment. One technical challenge that remains for this technology is to mitigate the problem of material retention in the v-blender due to formation of caked patches of salt/zeolite on the inner v-blender walls. KEYWORDS : Pyroprocessing, Ceramic Waste, Zeolite, Molten Salt, V-Blender 1. INTRODUCTION was, thus, determined to be impractical to attempt to distill all sodium from the fuel pins. And even if this distillation The Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II) was a could be achieved, it would be problematic to deal with the sodium-cooled, fast reactor that employed sodium-bonded Cs contamination in the sodium. The preferred processing binary (U-Zr) metal fuel during its o