Vitrification of Savannah River Site HLW Sludge Simulants at CEA Marcoule Industrial-scale Cold Crucible Induction Melter Demonstration Platform - 9186

The Cold Crucible Induction Melter technology (CCIM) is considered worldwide for industrial implementation to overcome the current limits of high level waste vitrification technologies and to answer future challenges such as: new or difficult effluent compositions, need for improving waste loading, need for high temperatures, and corrosive effluents. This technology is under consideration for waste glass melting at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF), located at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, USA. Studies have concluded that adapting CCIM technology to the existing DWPF plant can increase the rate of waste processing while reducing the number of HLW canisters required to be produced over the life of the facility. These significant process improvements are achievable by increasing waste loading in the glass product and improving waste throughput, as compared to the plant’s existing Joule-heated Melter technology. In order to validate the advantages of replacing the current DWPF Joule-heated melter with a CCIM, a long-duration demonstration is to be performed by CEA-Marcoule on their existing “Creuset Froid Avance” (CFA), an industrial-scale demonstration platform equipped with a 650-mm diameter CCIM. This demonstration is part of Phase II-A of the ART CCIM Project that was awarded to AREVA Federal Services LLC (AFS) by the DOE and is funded in phases under the Advanced Remediation Technologies (ART) program. This paper describes the CFA large size platform and then discusses the very encouraging results obtained from demonstration runs completed at Marcoule in 2007. Two demonstration runs have been completed on the CFA platform with a liquid feed: an Sludge Batch 3 (SB3) surrogate representing a low solids, iron-rich SRS sludge in the alkaline form, and with waste loadings of up to 52wt%. Finally, the last part of the presentation describes the Phase II-A demonstrations. To reach the targeted objectives two runs are planned in 2009, with a liquid feed representing the current DWPF flow-sheet (Sludge Batch 4 (SB4) type waste composition).