Fuzhi Li

Removal of Co2+ and Sr2+ from a Primary Coolant by Continuous Electrodeionization Packed with Weak Base Anion Exchange Resin

Abstract The rapid development of the nuclear power plant (NPP) in China leads to increasing attention to the minimization of radioactive waste. The primary coolant is one of the sources of low-level radioactive wastewater and must be decontaminated before its discharge to the environment. One of the possibilities is by means of continuous electrodeionization (CEDI) technology. In this paper the lab-scale experiments demonstrate that CEDI can offer favorable decontamination of primary coolant in NPP, with minimized radioactive spent resin production. Displacement of the anion exchanger by weak base anion exchangers in a CEDI module can improve the Co2+ and Sr2+ removal. In the dilute effluent of the modified module, Co2+ and Sr2+ concentrations are below 2 ng·l–1 and 58 to 114 ng·l–1, respectively, which is much lower than the commercial one of 205 to 289 ng·l–1 and 268 to 326 ng·l–1. This displacement has a negligible influence on the electrical resistance of the module.

Filtering of Low-Level Radioactive Wastewater by Means of Vacuum Membrane Distillation

Abstract The rapid development of nuclear power plants (NPPs) in China has caused increasing attention to be paid to the treatment of low-level radioactive wastewaters (LLRWs). One possibility is the application of vacuum membrane distillation (VMD). In this study, a commercial hydrophobic microporous polypropylene membrane was investigated with respect to nuclide decontamination and permeate flux performance in the VMD process. The results demonstrate that vacuum pressure has the most obvious influence on permeate flux, followed by feed temperature and feed velocity. Despite the influence of operational parameters, effective nuclide filtering can be achieved with average decontamination factor (DF) values consistently higher than 1700. The salt concentration in the feed solution decreases the permeate flux and nuclide filtering. However, the VMD process still offers high average DF values of 6000 for Cs(I), 3700 for Sr(II), and 8300 for Co(II), even when the feed salt concentration reaches 80 g L−1. After operation at a high salt concentration, there is no obvious variation in the chemical composition on the membrane surface based on the attenuated total reflectance–Fourier transform infrared spectra. A brief comparison shows that the process integrating reverse osmosis and VMD is a promising method for treating LLRWs and minimizing radioactive waste in NPPs.