HLW Workshop - Executive Summary

EMSP High Level Waste Principal Investigator Workshop

The DOE Office of Science-Environmental Management Science Program (EMSP) conducted a High Level Waste Workshop on January 19 and 20, 2005 at the Savannah River Site’s SREL Conference Center. The workshop was organized to facilitate the exchange of information between university and national laboratory scientists and contractor and DOE personnel from Idaho, Hanford, and Savannah River sites responsible for the management of high level waste. Following overviews of the Savannah River, Hanford and Idaho high level waste programs and science and technology needs, principal investigators (PI) for 27 projects reviewed findings and progress on their research programs focused on key science and technology components of high level waste management. The workshop provided an excellent venue for the PI and site operations personnel to develop contacts and facilitate communications which will advance the science and technology resulting from these projects in a manner that will better address the needs of the HLW operations at each of the sites.

The research projects discussed at the workshop described new diagnostic tools for glass melt monitoring in high temperature and radioactive environments, innovative techniques for real-time monitoring of chemical constituents in high-level waste process streams, and fundamental information on ionic liquids that facilitate competing solvent extraction or ion exchange processes for chemical and radiochemical separations. The programs have contributed to improved understanding of the basic chemistry associated with the extraction of radionuclides and stable elements from waste and modeling of the reactions, enhanced understanding of corrosion processes of waste containers, unique solidification methods for in-tank solidification, development of models for calculating thermodynamic stabilities of components of wastes, mechanistic elucidation of “waste aging”, models predicting rates of hydrogen generation from waste, the formation, solubilities and transformation of Al-bearing phases under processing conditions, and new thermodynamic models for complexation reactions in complex mixtures.