Cold Dissolved Saltcake Waste Simulant Development, Preparation, and Analysis

CH2M HILL Hanford Group, Inc. is identifying and developing supplemental process technologies to accelerate the Hanford tank waste cleanup mission. Bulk vitrification, containerized grout, and steam reforming are three technologies under consideration for treatment of the radioactive saltcake wastes in 68 single-shell tanks. To support development and testing of these technologies, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) was tasked with developing a cold dissolved saltcake simulant formulation to be representative of an actual saltcake waste stream, preparing 25- and 100-L batches of the simulant, and analyzing the composition of the batches to ensure conformance to formulation targets. Lacking a defined composition for dissolved actual saltcake waste, PNNL used available tank waste composition information and an equilibrium chemistry model (Environmental Simulation Program [ESP{trademark}]) to predict the concentrations of analytes in solution. Observations of insoluble solids in initial laboratory preparations for the model-predicted formulation prompted reductions in the concentration of phosphate and silicon in the final simulant formulation. The analytical results for the 25- and 100-L simulant batches, prepared by an outside vendor to PNNL specifications, agree within the expected measurement accuracy ({approx}10%) of the target concentrations and are highly consistent for replicate measurements, with a few minor exceptions. In parallel with themore » production of the 2nd simulant batch (100-L), a 1-L laboratory control sample of the same formulation was carefully prepared at PNNL to serve as an analytical standard. The instrumental analyses indicate that the vendor prepared batches of solution adequately reflect the as-formulated simulant composition. In parallel with the simulant development effort, a nominal 5-M (molar) sodium actual waste solution was prepared at the Hanford Site from a limited number of tank waste samples. Because this actual waste solution w as also to be used for testing the supplemental treatment technologies, the modeled simulant formulation was predicated on the composite of waste samples used to prepare it. Subsequently, the actual waste solution was filtered and pretreated to remove radioactive cesium at PNNL and then analyzed using the same instrumentation and procedures applied to the simulant samples. The overall agreement of measured simulant and actual waste solution compositions is better than {+-}10% for the most concentrated species including sodium, nitrate, hydroxide, carbonate, and nitrite. While the magnitude of the relative difference in the simulant and actual waste composition is large (>20% difference) for a few analytes (aluminum, chromium, fluoride, potassium, and total organic carbon), the absolute differences in concentration are in general not appreciable. Our evaluation is that these differences in simulant and actual waste solutions should have a negligible impact on bulk vitrification and containerized grout process testing, while the impact of the low aluminum concentration on steam reforming is yet to be determined.« less