Treatment of low-level radioactive waste by plasma vitrification for permanent disposal

The treatment of radioactive waste (RW) pursues one or several of the following purposes: transformation of RW into physical and chemical compounds suitable for radionuclides immobilization; volume reduction; sorting of RW (e.g. for selective radionuclides removal); ballast materials removal; remediation of noncontaminated materials for future utilization. Some features of RW plasma treatment are considered in the report and it is shown that plasma technology principally is able to fulfill all the purposes in the framework of a single approach