Waste salt interactions

During the course of the experimental program, many phenomena will be investigated in detail. Most of these studies will address details of waste/salt interaction, radionuclide migration and salt stability. Results may affect the mode of long-term operation and design of the repository. 

This project placed encapsulated spent fuel elements from an experimental AEG reactor into storage holes drilled into the floor of the mine located in a salt bed. Valuable experimental information was obtained about the interaction between the waste form and the salt in which the waste was emplaced. It was in fact this experiment, conducted in 1968, which revealed that inclusions of moisture, or brine, in the salt beds have a tendency to migrate up a thermal gradient towards a heat source placed in the salt. Quantities of brine were measured as migrating to the deposited waste canisters and the interaction of this brine with the canis-tered material was observed. 

In sum, there are four major sources of soluble salts in river basins (i) meteoric salts (ii) salts derived from water-rock interaction (e.g., dissolution of evaporitic rocks) (iii) salts derived from remnants of formation water entrapped in the basin and (iv) anthropogenic salts (e.g., waste-water effluents). Meteoric salts are concentrated via in-stream net evaporation and evapotransprra-tion along the river flow. In addition, meteoric salts can be recycled through irrigation in the watershed and development of saline agricultural drainage water that flows to the river. 

Hawthorne and coworkers. However, the interatomic distances of Cs to the carborane cages are such that it could be regarded as a cesium-carborane complex in which some degree of interaction exists between the metal and the 7C-electron density on the carborane cage. Since this cesium compound can also be prepared by an ion-exchange reaction directly from lithium, sodium or potassium salts of the C B -cage (see Figure 6b), further study of this and related compounds in solvent extraction of radioactive cesium metal ( Cs) from nuclear waste is envisioned. 

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