THERMAL ANALYSIS FOR IN-TANK ION-EXCHANGE COLUMN PROCESS
High Level Waste (HLW) at the Savannah River Site (SRS) is stored in three forms: sludge, saltcake, and supernate. A small column ion-exchange (SCIX) process is being designed to treat dissolved saltcake waste before feeding it to the saltstone facility to be made into grout. The waste is caustic with high concentrations of various sodium salts and lower concentrations of radionuclides. Two cation exchange media being considered are a granular form of crystalline silicotitanate (CST) and a spherical form of resorcinol-formaldehyde (RF) resin. CST is an inorganic material highly selective for cesium that is not elutable. Through this process, radioactive cesium from the salt solution is absorbed into ion exchange media (either CST or RF) which is packed within a flow-through column. A packed column loaded with radioactive cesium generates significant heat from radiolytic decay. If engineering designs cannot handle this thermal load, hot spots may develop locally which could degrade the performance of the ion-exchange media. Performance degradation with regard to cesium removal has been observed between 50 and 80 C for CST [1] and at 65 C for RF resin [2]. In addition, the waste supernate solution will boil around 130 C. If the columns boiled dry, the sorbent material could plug the column and lead to replacement of the entire column module. Alternatively, for organic resins such as RF there is risk of fire at elevated temperatures. The objective of the work is to compute temperature distributions across CST- and RF-packed columns immersed in waste supernate under accident scenarios involving loss of salt solution flow through the beds and, in some cases, loss of coolant system flow. For some cases, temperature distributions are determined as a function of time after the initiation of a given accident scenario and in other cases only the final steady-state temperature distributions are calculated. In general, calculations are conducted to ensure conservative and bounding results for the maximum temperatures achievable using the current baseline column design. This information will assist in SCIX design and facility maintenance.
- Research Organization:
- SRS
- Sponsoring Organization:
- DOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC09-08SR22470
- OSTI ID:
- 945389
- Report Number(s):
- SRNL-STI-2009-00004
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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