Optimizing liquid waste treatment processing in PWRs: focus on modeling of the variation of ion-exchange resins selectivity coefficients

A bibliographic survey has highlighted the essential role of selectivity on resin efficiency, especially the variation of selectivity coefficients in function of the resin saturation state and the operating conditions. This phenomenon has been experimentally confirmed but is not yet implemented into an ion-exchange model specific for resins. This paper reviews the state of the art in predicting sorption capacity of ion-exchange resins. Different models accounting for ions activities inside the resin phase are available. Moreover, a comparison between the values found in the literature and our results has been done. The results of sorption experiments of cobalt chloride on a strong cationic gel type resin used in French PWRs are presented. The graph describing the variation of selectivity coefficient with respect to cobalt equivalent fraction is drawn. The parameters determined by the analysis of this graph are injected in a new physico-chemical law. Implementation of this model in the chemical speciation simulation code CHESS enables to study the overall effect of this approach for the sorption in a batch. (authors)