CHEMADD, a computer program to make up feed material for the nuclear waste vitrification process

Incorporating the West Valley high-level nuclear wastes in borosilicate glass for disposal requires several steps that must be performed precisely and efficiently. One of the major steps is blending the wastes with glass-forming chemicals prior to fusion in a ceramic melter. The process involves transferring a controlled quantity of waste slurry into a feed makeup tank, sampling this slurry and performing a chemical analysis to derive the amount of oxides that will be produced from the slurry, and adding the appropriate amounts of glass-forming and shim chemicals. These added materials, which exist as hydroxides, nitrates, carbonates, and oxide forms, can be sources for several of the desired chemicals when the impurities are included. A computer program, CHEMADD, has been developed to calculate the amount of chemicals to be added to the feed tank to satisfy these requirements on a routine basis. The program has been written in FORTRAN and uses a forms management software package on a VAX 8350 machine