Hanford Supplemental Waste Processing Technologies - Fiscal Year 2003 Recommendations for Selective Dissolution Studies and Radioactive Waste Preparation

This document describes two tasks that support CH2M Hill Hanford Group's (CHG) Mission Acceleration Initiative (MAI) testing and demonstration/deployment of supplemental technologies, but the tasks are not to be part of the vendor's scope. The vendor's will be provided samples of radioactive waste for their testing. This document describes the preparation of the radioactive waste samples. CHG is responsible to retrieve the saltcake waste from the single-shell tanks and expects to dissolve the waste using water dissolution. When water dissolves the waste the more soluble components of the waste (including cesium) will dissolve first, leaving the lesser soluble components of the waste in the tank. This phenomenon, termed selective dissolution, is expected to provide a partial separation of cesium from the waste. This document also describes a program involving tank dissolution demonstrations, modeling, and laboratory testing to more completely understand how the composition of the retrieved salt cake waste will change during the course of retrieval