(Photo by U.S.
Department of Energy)
Securing a
shipment of mixed, low-level waste from Hanford for treatment and disposal.
(December 2, 2015) Physicists
at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
(PPPL) are proposing a new way to process nuclear waste that uses a
plasma-based centrifuge. Known as plasma mass filtering, the new mass
separation techniques would supplement chemical techniques. It is hoped that this combined approach would
reduce both the cost of nuclear waste disposal and the amount of byproducts
produced during the process. This work
was supported by PPPL's Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program.
"The safe disposal of nuclear waste is a colossal problem,"
said Renaud Gueroult, staff physicist at PPPL and lead author of the paper that
appeared in the Journal of Hazardous Materials in October. "One solution
might be to supplement existing chemical separation techniques with plasma
separation techniques, which could be economically attractive, ideally leading
to a reevaluation of how nuclear waste is processed."
The immediate motivation for safe disposal is the
radioactive waste stored currently at the Hanford Site, a facility in
Washington State that produced plutonium for nuclear weapons during the Cold
War. The volume of this waste originally totaled 54 million gallons and was
stored in 177 underground tanks.
Machinery to encase
waste in glass
In 2000, Hanford engineers began building machinery that
would encase the radioactive waste in glass. The method, known as
"vitrification," had been used at another Cold War-era nuclear
production facility since 1996. A multibillion-dollar vitrification plant is
currently under construction at the Hanford site.