At the end of July, the Liquid Radioactive Waste Treatment Plant of Chornobyl NPP was visited by the representatives of the Central Enterprise for Radioactive Waste Management (CERWM).
The major interest of CERWM specialists was the monitoring of technological process of treatment and cementation of liquid radioactive waste (RAW), as well as RAW package manufacture quality control.
CERWM is the state enterprise ensuring operation of the storage facilities designed for Ukrainian radioactive waste disposal. ChNPP transfers to these storage facilities its own waste accumulated during operation of the plant and those being generated during its decommissioning.
Prior to transfer for disposal, all RAW are specially prepared. In case of liquid RAW, the preparation belongs to their immobilization (in other words, cementation) into 200-litre drums. That means that the output of the Liquid RAW Treatment Plant is a steel drum filled with solidified radioactive waste in the form of concrete.
The whole above-described process is divided into well-defined stages, during which RAW has to meet a set of characteristics which guarantee safe long-term storage at the storage facilities of CERWM. Taking into account the above-mentioned, one more task of the commission was to control the compliance of these wastes with disposal acceptance criteria.
Such inspections are agreed according to the “Criteria of Radioactive Waste Acceptance for Disposal at the Engineered Near-Surface Solid Radioactive Waste Disposal Facility (ENSDF)”.
Besides, the representatives of CERWM got familiar with activity of the Measuring Water-Radiochemical Laboratory of ChNPP, operation of the Automated Process Control System, radiation monitoring systems, and they saw a procedure of cement acceptance at LRTP with their own eyes.
