Feasibility of gas-phase decontamination of gaseous diffusion equipment
Abstract
The five buildings at the K-25 Site formerly involved in the gaseous diffusion process contain 5000 gaseous diffusion stages as well as support facilities that are internally contaminated with uranium deposits. The gaseous diffusion facilities located at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant and the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant also contain similar equipment and will eventually close. The decontamination of these facilities will require the most cost-effective technology consistent with the criticality, health physics, industrial hygiene, and environmental concerns; the technology must keep exposures to hazardous substances to levels as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA). This report documents recent laboratory experiments that were conducted to determine the feasibility of gas-phase decontamination of the internal surfaces of the gaseous diffusion equipment that is contaminated with uranium deposits. A gaseous fluorinating agent is used to fluorinate the solid uranium deposits to gaseous uranium hexafluoride (UF{sub 6}), which can be recovered by chemical trapping or freezing. The lab results regarding the feasibility of the gas-phase process are encouraging. These results especially showed promise for a novel decontamination approach called the long-term, low-temperature (LTLT) process. In the LTLT process: The equipment is rendered leak tight, evacuated, leak tested, and pretreated, charged with chlorine trifluoride (ClF{sub 3}) to subatmospheric pressure, left for…
Read the paper
Related studies
- Learning from First-Generation Qualitative Approaches in the IS Discipline: An Evolutionary View and Some Implications for Authors and Evaluators (PART 1/2)
- Commentary on the clinical and preclinical dosage limits of interstitially administered magnetic fluids for therapeutic hyperthermia based on current practice and efficacy models
- Prosthesis: New Technological Opportunities and Innovative Biomedical Devices
- The history and future of neural modeling for cochlear implants
- Ryanodine receptors: waking up from refractoriness
- Novel Transgenic Rabbit Model Sheds Light on the Puzzling Role of Matrix Metalloproteinase-12 in Atherosclerosis
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.