Actions for Special waste-form lysimeters - arid [electronic resource] : 1984--1992 data summary and preliminary interpretation

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Special waste-form lysimeters - arid [electronic resource] : 1984--1992 data summary and preliminary interpretation

Published
Washington, D.C. : United States. Dept. of Energy, 1994.
Oak Ridge, Tenn. : Distributed by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, U.S. Dept. of Energy.
Physical Description
201 pages : digital, PDF file
Additional Creators
Pacific Northwest Laboratory, United States. Department of Energy, and United States. Department of Energy. Office of Scientific and Technical Information
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Summary
A lysimeter facility constructed at the Hanford Site in south-central Washington State has been used since 1984 to monitor the leaching of buried waste forms under natural conditions. The facility is generating data that are useful in evaluating source-term models used in radioactive waste transport analyses. The facility includes ten bare-soil lysimeters (183 cm diameter by 305 cm depth) containing buried waste forms generated at nuclear reactors in the United States and solidified with Portland M cement, masonry cement, bitumen, and vinyl-ester styrene. The waste forms contained in the lysimeters have been leached under natural, semiarid conditions. In spite of the semiarid conditions, from 1984 through 1992, an average of 45 cm of water leached through the lysimeters, representing 27% of area precipitation. Leachate samples have been routinely collected and analyzed for radionuclide and chemical content. To date, tritium, cobalt-60, and cesium-137 have been identified in the lysimeter leachate samples. From 1984 through 1992, over 4000 μCi of tritium, representing 76 and 71 % of inventory (not decay corrected), have been leached from the two waste forms containing tritium. Cobalt-60 has been found in the leachate from all six of the waste forms that originally contained > 1 mCi of inventory. The leached amounts of cobalt-60 represent < 0.1 % of original cobalt inventories. Mobile cobalt is believed to be chelated with organic compounds, such as ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA), that are present in the waste. Trace amounts of cesium-137 have occasionally been identified in leachate from two waste forms since 1991. Qualitatively, the field leaching results confirm laboratory studies suggesting that tritium is readily leached from cement, and that cobalt-60 is generally leached more easily from cement than from vinyl-ester styrene.
Report Numbers
E 1.99:pnl--8955
pnl--8955
Subject(s)
Other Subject(s)
Note
Published through SciTech Connect.
10/01/1994.
"pnl--8955"
"DE95000839"
Jones, T.L.; Serne, R.J.
Type of Report and Period Covered Note
Topical; 10/01/1994 - 10/01/1994
Funding Information
AC06-76RL01830
View MARC record | catkey: 14143956