Hazardous Waste Treatment Facility and skid-mounted treatment systems at Los Alamos
To centralize treatment, storage, and areas for hazardous wastes, Los Alamos National Laboratory has designed a 1115 m2 hazardous waste treatment facility. The facility will house a treatment room for each of four kinds of wastes: nonradioactive characteristic wastes, nonradioactive listed wastes, radioactive characteristic wastes, and radioactive listed wastes. The facility will be used for repacking labpacks; bulking small organic waste volumes; processing scintillation vials; treating reactives such as lithium hydride and pyrophoric uranium; treating contaminated solids such as barium sand; treating plating wastes and other solutions with heavy metals and oxidizing organics: Separate treatment rooms will allow workers to avoid mixing waste types and prevent cross-contamination. The ventilation air from the treatment areas may contain hazardous or radioactive dust. Gas may also leak from process equipment. The gas treatment process includes separating solids and gases and neutralization or adsorption of the hazardous gases. The ventilation air from each room will first be filtered before being scrubbed in a common gas caustic scrubber on an outside pad. There are two levels of exhaust in each treatment room, one for heavy gases and another for light gases. Several features help mitigate or eliminate hazards due to spills and releases: each treatment room is sealed and under slight negative pressure; each room has its own HEPA filtration; to avoid mixing of incompatible wastes and reagents, portable individual spill-containment trays are used for skids, to limit the danger of spills, the waste is directly transferred from outside storage to the treatment room; to mitigate the consequences of a gas release in the room, mobile hoods are connected to the exhaust-air treatment system; the floor, walls, ceilings, fixtures, ducts, and piping are made of acid-resistant material or are coated.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-36
- OSTI ID:
- 10119742
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-94-361; CONF-940225-7; ON: DE94006152; TRN: 94:006409
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Waste management `94: working towards a cleaner environment,Tucson, AZ (United States),27 Feb - 3 Mar 1994; Other Information: PBD: [1994]
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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