November AIChE Local Meeting

Date:           Thursday, November 21, 2019

Location:     Rothchild Catering and Conference Center, 8807 Kingston Pike, Knoxville TN

37923

5:00 pm       Executive Committee Meeting (All members welcome)

5:30 pm       Social/Networking

6:00 pm       Dinner - $20 or $22.85 for attendees and free for students (Pay by cash or check onsite, or in advance using Eventbrite).

There is no charge for the program or PDH Certificate

7:00 pm       Program – Paul A. Taylor– ORNL

CST – Its Rise and Fall ^{and Rise,} and My Part In It

Abstract - DOE has >90M gal of radioactive tank waste at the Hanford Site, the Savannah River Site, Idaho National Laboratory and ORNL, most of which is High Level Waste.  Most of the radionuclides are in a relatively small amount of sludge, while most of the volume is salt solution, with low levels of radionuclides, except for Cs-137.  Treating the salt solutions will allow them to be disposed of as Low Level Waste.  The treatment will need to remove 99.99+% of nominally 0.3 mM Cs-137 from a 5 M Na solution, a very difficult separation.  DOE funded the development of several processes for removing Cs-137, including crystalline silicotitanate (CST).  I was the technical lead for the Cesium Removal Demonstration, which was the first large-scale test of CST, to treat the supernate in the ORNL Melton Valley Storage Tanks.  The operation treated 270,000 gallons of supernate and removed over 7700 curies of Cs-137.  I was also involved in later efforts to use CST at the SRS and Hanford sites.  Some of the experiments that I performed showed that CST could form clumps after long exposure to the supernate solutions, which might prevent sluicing of the CST from the columns used to treat the waste.  These results were one of the primary reasons that CST was not chosen for use at SRS or Hanford.  By 2007 it appeared that CST would not be used for treatment of any more tank waste.  However, this has changed over the past couple of years.  SRS is currently using CST in a supplementary treatment system, and Hanford is currently evaluating using CST.

Speaker Biography - Paul A. Taylor is a senior development engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with over 45 years experience.  He has been a principal investigator in laboratory- and pilot-scale studies of production of surrogate nuclear debris, production of various uranium compounds, fission product separations, wastewater treatment, and high-level waste treatment.  Other areas of interest include chemical and biological treatment of wastewater for removing metals, organics and radionuclides, and in reducing the biotoxicity of effluents.  He graduated with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University in 1974, and started work at the Development Division of the Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant that year.  He transferred to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1988.  Paul has been Treasurer and membership Chairman of the Oak Ridge – Knoxville Section of AIChE for many years, and has previously served as Chair and Director.