Development of sodium conversion technology; Method and basic features of sodium conversion process

Matsumoto, Toshiyuki; Yoshida, Eiichi; Suzuki, Shigeaki*; Yasu, Tomohisa*

Decommissioning of a sodium cooled fast reactor or an experimental facility which used radioactive sodium will bring a lot of radioactive sodium. However, technology to deal with such the radioactive sodium and decommission is not well established in Japan. Then, basic experimental study has been carried out in order to find and estimate an economic and safety process of the radioactive sodium decommission. There were some examples in overseas to convert the sodium into sodium hydroxide via sodium-water reaction. This method was examined by a basic sodium conversion test apparatus. In the experiment, liquid metal sodium was injected into the sodium hydroxide. Influences of temperature and concentration of the sodium hydroxide were investigated. Nitrogen gas was injected into the sodium hydroxide as atomizing gas in order to protect the sodium injection nozzle and also to mix the sodium. Then the gas flow rate was also varied to see the desired effects. Injected sodium temperature and mass flow rate were fixed at 200C and 10kg/h, respectively. The atomizing gas flow rate, the temperature and concentration of the sodium hydroxide were varied in ranges of 60-100 l/min, 70-100C and 40-60wt%, respectively. The influences of these parameters on the sodium conversion reaction were evaluated. The experiments showed that increase of the atomizing gas resulted in stable injection of the sodium and also larger reaction area. The temperature of the sodium hydroxide had small influences on the reaction, however, the sodium injection nozzle tended to choke up when the temperature was less than 70C. The lower concentration resulted in larger temperature fluctuation and also enlarged the reaction area. Unstable reaction, for example, sudden increase of reaction rate due to excess sodium, was not found under the conditions above listed ranges and stable sodium conversion was confirmed.