Determination of long-lived fission products and actinides in Savannah River site HLW sludge and glass for waste acceptance

Abstract

Savannah River Site (SRS) is currently immobilizing the radioactive, caustic, high-level waste sludge in Tank 51 into a borosilicate glass for disposal in a geologic repository. A requirement for repository acceptance is that SRS report the concentrations of certain fission product and actinide radionuclides in the glass. This paper presents measurements of many of these concentrations in both Tank 51 sludge and the final glass. The radionuclides were measured by inductively coupled plasma - mass spectrometry and {alpha}, {beta}, and {gamma} counting methods. Examples of the radionuclides are Sr-90, Cs-137, U-238, Pu-239, and Cm-244. Concentrations in the glass are 3.1 times lower due to dilution of the sludge with a nonradioactive glass forming frit in the vitrification process. Results also indicated that in both the sludge and glass the relative concentrations of the long lived fission products insoluble in caustic area in proportion to their yields from the fission of U-235 in the SRS reactors. This allowed the calculation of a fission yield scaling factor. This factor in addition to the sludge dilution factor can be used to estimate concentrations of waste acceptance radionuclides that cannot be measured in the glass

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