Calculation of the Absorbed Dose by a Borosilicate Glass Matrix and its Simulated Irradiation

Abstract

The state of liquid radioactive wastes (LRW) management at Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) is characterized by the lack of a completed technological cycle from processing to obtaining the final product suitable for further long-term storage or disposal. As a result, the storage tanks for bottoms residue (BR) are 65-75% full (Zaporozhye and South-Ukrainian NPPs), and the resource for placing molten salt at Zaporizhzhya NPP (92.7%) is close to exhaustion [1]. Therefore, the development of technologies and materials for NPP LRW solidification is an urgent need and aims to ensure the processing of LRW to a solid state that will meet the acceptance criteria for disposal in centralized storage facilities. One of the effective methods of LRW solidification is their vitrification. The main advantage of vitrification is that during the vitrification process the volume of waste is reduced by several times and this saves expensive storage space [2, 3]. The purpose of this work is to calculate the absorbed dose that borosilicate glass matrices with included bottoms residue will accumulate over 300 years of storage, and to study the effect of simulated X-ray irradiation on their physical and mechanical properties.