Foundational research by our Chief Technology Officer. This paper was authored by Mark S. Denton — now Fluid Tech's CTO — during his tenure at Kurion, Inc., and presented at WM2011. It is included here because it documents the ion-specific media science that Fluid Tech's WTZ® and FHA media are built on; the summary below is for reference, and full details are in the cited paper.
01 Overview
02 Why it matters
- Targets the isotopes that drive classification: capturing Cs, Sr, Tc and I lets a waste-treatment plant minimize the volume of high-level waste requiring vitrification and maximize the lower-activity feed.
- The medium becomes the waste form: vitrification-compatible, inorganic media can be immobilized directly — leach-resistant, non-hydrogen-generating, and sluiceable.
- The lineage behind the product line: this ISM science underpins Fluid Tech's current WTZ® (zeolite) and FHA (hydroxyapatite) media.
03 How it was tested
A full spectrum of ISM was down-selected and evaluated on batch reactors and columns at analytical and bench scale, against:
- Near-neutral pH surrogates and actual feeds;
- Waste Treatment Plant secondary-waste-stream surrogates (pH ~8–9);
- Strontium (Sr-90) removal from chelated tanks (e.g., AN-102 and AN-107, pH 12–13);
- High-alkali WTP cesium pretreatment (pH ~14).
Testing was also carried out on actual commercial nuclear-power-plant waste streams — at the authors' Oak Ridge laboratory and independently on site at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), including fuel-pool and Boron Waste Storage Tank waters.