Development of Vitrification Process and Glass Formulation for Nuclear Waste Conditioning

The vitrification of high-level waste is the internationally recognized standard to minimize the impact to the environment resulting from waste disposal as well as to minimize the volume of conditioned waste to be disposed of. COGEMA has been vitrifying high-level waste industrially for over 20 years and is currently operating three commercial vitrification facilities based on a hot metal crucible technology, with outstanding records of safety, reliability and product quality. To further increase the performance of vitrification facilities, CEA and COGEMA have been developing the cold crucible melter technology since the beginning of the 1980s. This type of melter is characterized by a virtually unlimited equipment service life and a great flexibility in dealing with various types of waste and allowing development of high temperature matrices. In complement of and in parallel with the vitrification process, a glass formulation methodology has been developed by the CEA in order to tailor matrices for the wastes to be conditioned while providing the best adaptation to the processing technology. The development of a glass formulation is a trade-off between material properties and qualities, technical feasibility, and disposal safety criteria. It involves non-radioactive and radioactive laboratories in order to achieve a comprehensive matrix qualification. Several glasses and glass ceramics have thus been studied by the CEA to be compliant with industrial needs and waste characteristics: glasses or other matrices for a large spectrum of fission products, or for high contents of specifics elements such as sodium, phosphate, iron, molybdenum, or actinides. New glasses or glass-ceramics designed to minimize the final wasteform volume for solutions produced during the reprocessing of high burnup fuels or to treat legacy wastes are now under development and take benefit from the latest CEA hot-laboratories and technology development. The paper presents the CEA state-of-the-art in developing matrices or glasses and provides several examples.