Desactivation of liquid radioactive wastes of low and medium activity

The results of research made according to the prodranm of scientific and technical cooperation of the CMEA countries are discussed. The main direction of these research works is on future improvement of installations for purification of liquid radioactive wastes by chemical methods of coprecipitation and coagulation, ion exchange, sorption, distillation and electrolysis. It was shown that methods of coprecipitation and coagulation have low efficiency and the activity reduction factor seldom was more than 10. In sorption processes different sorbents, both organic and nonorganic were used. The modified bentonite used as a sorbent agent has shown high selectivity towards zesium ions. Waste concentration by means of distillation is an universal but rather expensive method and is applied mainly in the cases of high salts concentration and high specific activity of liquid wastes. Electrolysis, as a method of the liquid wastes purification is used in the USSR and has high efficiency with low energy consumption. (I.T.)