Development of new treatment process for low level radioactive waste at Tokai Reprocessing Plant

Sugaya, Atsushi ; Horiguchi, Kenichi ; Saito, Yasuo ; Tanaka, Kenji; Akutsu, Shigeru; Hirata, Toshiaki

The Low-level radioactive Waste Treatment Facility (LWTF) was constructed at the Tokai Reprocessing Plant and cold testing has been performed since 2006. The aims of this facility are to provide safe, effective and economic treatment of the Waste. The wastes treated in the LWTF are combustible and incombustible solid waste and liquid waste. The problem of burning up incombustible waste is to generate chlorine gas which causes corrosion. The incinerator is made of corrosion resistant metal and uses cooling water to prevent corrosion. The radio-nuclides separation process is newly-introduced for low-level radioactive liquid waste to reduce the deep geological disposal cost. A large amount of nitrate in the liquid waste might cause the environmental pollution. Nitrate ion decomposition technology is under development. A cement based encapsulation method to immobilize those liquid wastes has been developed. The results of these R&D work will be adopted in the LWTF in the near future.