Ion-exchange resins doped with toxic metals and radioactive metal surrogates were test-burned in a bench-scale molten salt oxidation (MSO) reactor system. The purposes of this study are to confirm the destruction performance of the two-stage MSO reactor system for the organic ion-exchange resin and to obtain an understanding of the behavior of the fixed toxic metals and the sulfur in the cationic exchange resins. The destruction of the organics is very efficient in the primary reactor. The primarily destroyed products such as carbon monoxide are completely oxidized in the secondary MSO reactor. The overall collection of the sulfur and metals in the two-stage MSO reactor system appeared to be very efficient. Over 99.5% of all the fixed toxic metals (lead and cadmium) and radioactive metal surrogates (cesium, cobalt, strontium) remained in the MSO reactor bottom. Thermodynamic equilibrium calculations and the XRD patterns of the spent salt samples revealed that the collected metals existed in the form of each of their carbonates or oxides, which are non-volatile species at the MSO system operating conditions.
In this study, the vacuum distillation of LiCl-KCl eutectic salt in a mixture of LiCl-KCl eutectic salt and rare-earth precipitates was carried out to evaluate the vaporization characteristics of LiCl-KCl eutectic salt. It was confirmed that the required time for salt vaporization was reduced by a reduction in the pressure. It appeared that the vaporization of LiCl-KCl eutectic salt containing rare-earth precipitates was decreased in comparison with that of pure salt because the salt adhered to the fine particles of the rare-earth precipitates. However, the distillation of the salt was almost achieved by elevating the surface area and further reducing the pressure. The distilled salt from the mixture consisted of 43.7 wt% LiCl and 56.3 wt% KCl. It is thought that the recovered salt can be reused because its composition is similar to the mixed ratio (44.2 wt% LiCl: 55.8 wt% KCl) of the salt used in an electrorefining process.
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