The United Kingdom’s National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) and contractor Kurion on Tuesday said they have finished a major phase of testing for commissioning the company’s GeoMelt In-Container Vitrification radioactive waste conversion system at the Sellafield site.
The technology, which would convert the waste into a condensed glass form for permanent storage, successfully processed a nonradioactive simulant. The plant must now be dismantled and shipped to the NNL Central Laboratory at Sellafield, where it will be reassembled and tested using a radioactive material. It is scheduled to be operational in 2016.
The United Kingdom holds more than 300,000 metric tons of intermediate- and low-level waste that could be treated with the GeoMelt system, Kurion said. The technology could be applied to contaminated soil, inorganic ion exchange media, and contaminated asbestos that can be found at a number of sites being decommissioned, the release says.
“The cold-commissioning of the GeoMelt system is an important milestone as part of our core mission to evaluate options to improve the lifecycle cost for managing and dispositioning waste streams in the UK nuclear complex, including problematic waste streams that currently lack a path to disposal,” Nick Hanigan, NNL director of waste management and decommissioning, said in the release. “Furthermore, this collaboration with Kurion brings together world-class scientists and engineers to accelerate the treatment of hazardous and radioactive waste.”
The GeoMelt system since the 1990s has converted waste into more than 26,000 metric tons of glass in the U.K., U.S., Japan, and Australia, Kurion said. The company and National Nuclear Laboratory plan next year to boost the system’s annual processing capability to more than 200 metric tons.