Mixed Organic and Mineral Waste Processing by Incineration-Vitrification : Case of Bituminous Media
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Mixed Organic and Mineral Waste Processing by Incineration-Vitrification : Case of Bituminous Media Christophe Girold, Olivier Pinet, Florent Lemort Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (CEA), Rhône Valley Research Center CEA/DEN/DIEC/SCDV – Marcoule – BP 71171 - 30207 Bagnols-sur-Cèze Cedex, France
ABSTRACT Burnable radioactive waste management options are often in favour of the vitrification due to their volume reduction, resulting in cost saving for transport and storage. More, the interest is also to obtain a best radioactivity immobilization in a long-lasting matrix. Development made on incineration-vitrification process must take into account radioactivity environment in term of process compactness, gas treatment and secondary wastes. A new and simplified equipment, using thermal oxygen plasma coupled with a cold crucible melter, is being developed at the Valrho-Marcoule nuclear centre (France) : SHIVA, for Advanced Hybrid System for Incineration and Vitrification. As part of studies concerning the management of bitumen canisters stored in Marcoule, the feasibility of their treatment in an incinerationvitrification process have been tested. This treatment could concern the most radioactive bituminised waste drums because they have to be sent in a costly storage site in consideration of their radioactivity. The interest of such treatment is first to reduce the volume of wastes in order to appreciably diminish the cost of this storage.
INTRODUCTION The incineration-vitrification processes, in their general principles, consist in burning the waste on top of a molten glass and incorporate the ashes into this melt. The glass, after cooling, becomes a containment matrix where the radioactive species initially contained in the burnable waste are then incorporated. This process aims to notably reduce the volume of wastes and permits to guaranty a high durability containment for the radionucleides incorporated to the glass. The interest of this process comes from its compactness thanks to the closeness of combustion and vitrification stages. Contrary to incineration processes like IRIS [1], set up in VALDUC center in France, incineration-vitrification processes do not aim to recover radioactive elements included in the initial burnable waste in order to valorise them. Various technologies have been tested. The plasma technology is the one that permits to design a more compact and more efficient process ; it appears to be the most suitable technique for the treatment of organic wastes containing high amount of minerals [2]. In the same time, the cold crucible melter technology permits to reach high values of melting (>1100°C) and induces no secondary refractory waste. Glass formulations that can also be melted permit to decrease the volume of wastes and to improve the quality of the containment matrix. The pilot SHIVA is the result of the coupling of these two technologies.
The possibility to treat by incineration-vitrification old bituminised waste drums stored in Marcoule has been studied. It could concern drums whic
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