Abstract
The clean-up of the Fukushima Daiichi site, after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, continues to generate large amounts of spent adsorbents. These adsorbents need to be disposed of permanently in a low temperature immobilisation process to avoid volatilising radioactive Cs and Sr species. To this end an immobilisation process with a maximum temperature of 600 °C was developed by sintering model waste with glass frit to form a dense Glass Composite Material (GCM) wasteform. A zeolitic model wasteform, chabazite, was sintered with a lead borosilicate glass composition at a maximum temperature of 600 °C. The sintering process was optimised with various thermal treatment steps to ensure that volatile species, aqueous or otherwise, were released before full sintering to yield a dense final wasteform. With this process dense wasteforms of up to 40 wt. % chabazite have been achieved.
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Pletser, D., Chinnam, R.K., Kamoshida, M. et al. Immobilisation process for contaminated zeolitic ion exchangers from Fukushima. MRS Advances 1, 4089–4094 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1557/adv.2017.194
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1557/adv.2017.194