December 2, 2015

PPPL physicists propose new plasma-based method to treat radioactive waste


(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.

read entire press  release >>