Scale Up of Ceramic Waste Forms for Electrorefiner Salts Produced during Spent Fuel Treatment

A full-scale process has been developed to immobilize fission products that accumulate within the Mark IV electrorefiner (ER) electrolyte at Idaho National Laboratory. ER salt was blended with treatment additives, followed by pressureless consolidation (PC) in a furnace to produce a durable ceramic waste form (CWF). The goal is the development of a process to consolidate actual radioactive ER salt into a form suitable for transportation and disposal. Four batches (300 to 400 kg per batch) of full-scale pre-qualification material preparation runs have been prepared. From these four batches of nonradioactive salt-loaded surrogate material, three full-scale PC trials have been conducted. The first PC test run, established equipment parameters with a basic CWF container design. The second trial included a modified CWF container design, real-time measurement of CWF consolidation, and an audio recording to identify cracking during the CWF cool-down. During the third trial, salt was doped (from the fourth material preparation batch) to create a nonradioactive salt material and to more closely represent actual ER salt. The second and third trials were also used to validate a model developed for the CWF. The CWF model is beneficial for understanding and predicting the physical processes that occur during the heat cycle. This would be particularly useful when the CWF is located in a hot cell, which makes accessing and examining a CWF difficult.