Tc-99 Decontamination From Heat Treated Gaseous Diffusion Membrane -Phase I
- Savannah River Site (SRS), Aiken, SC (United States). Savannah River National Lab. (SRNL)
Uranium gaseous diffusion cascades represent a significant environmental challenge to dismantle, containerize and dispose as low-level radioactive waste. Baseline technologies rely on manual manipulations involving direct access to technetium-contaminated piping and materials. There is a potential to utilize novel thermal decontamination technologies to remove the technetium and allow for on-site disposal of the very large uranium converters. Technetium entered these gaseous diffusion cascades as a hexafluoride complex in the same fashion as uranium. Technetium, as the isotope Tc-99, is an impurity that follows uranium in the first cycle of the Plutonium and Uranium Extraction (PUREX) process. The technetium speciation or exact form in the gas diffusion cascades is not well defined. Several forms of Tc-99 compounds, mostly the fluorinated technetium compounds with varying degrees of volatility have been speculated by the scientific community to be present in these cascades. Therefore, there may be a possibility of using thermal desorption, which is independent of the technetium oxidation states, to perform an in situ removal of the technetium as a volatile species and trap the radionuclide on sorbent traps which could be disposed as low-level waste.
- Research Organization:
- Savannah River Site (SRS), Aiken, SC (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC09-08SR22470
- OSTI ID:
- 1348180
- Report Number(s):
- SRNL--STI-2016-00740
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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