Ion Exchange and Adsorption Technologies for Hanford Tank Waste Treatment
Summary
The legacy underground storage tanks at the Hanford Site contain highly alkaline, high‐salt radioactive supernatants and slurries loaded with cesium, strontium, technetium and actinides. Effective separation of these radionuclides is critical to reduce tank farm risk and to prepare waste streams for immobilisation. Ion exchange employs engineered solid resins or crystalline inorganic frameworks that selectively replace benign ions in the treatment medium with target radionuclides, offering high selectivity under extreme pH and ionic‐strength conditions. Adsorption processes exploit surface complexation on metal oxides, carbon materials or hybrid composites to capture non‐exchangeable species, particularly polyvalent actinides and pertechnetate. Process design ranges from packed‐bed columns and stirred vessels to multi‐layer filter cartridges, incorporating real‐time monitoring of breakthrough curves and automated resin regeneration. Advances in material chemistry, process modelling and pilot‐scale demonstrations at Hanford have underpinned the transition from laboratory tests to full‐scale operations, with transferable lessons for other nuclear clean-up sites worldwide.
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Ion Exchange and Adsorption Technologies for Hanford Tank Waste Treatment publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in ion exchange and adsorption technologies for hanford tank waste treatment across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Ion exchange: A separation process in which ions from a liquid are swapped with counter-ions on a solid resin or inorganic material.
Adsorption: The adhesion of dissolved species onto the surface of a solid sorbent via physical or chemical interactions.
Crystalline silicotitanate (CST): An inorganic, ion-selective material exhibiting high affinity for cesium in alkaline solutions.
Distribution coefficient (Kd): The ratio of a species’ concentration on a solid sorbent to its concentration in solution, indicating sorption strength.
Bed depth service time (BDST): A modelling concept that relates column height and influent concentration to breakthrough time for fixed-bed operations.
References
- Computational and experimental studies into the hydrodynamic operation conditions of container filters for ion-selective treatment. Nuclear Energy and Technology (2022).
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