Abstract
Plasma treatment of low level nuclear waste has several advantages over conventional technologies. One advantage is its capability of handling various types of nuclear waste, including organic, inorganic, contaminated soils, etc. The other advantages include complete destruction (gasification) and vitrification of low level waste. In order to understand the relation between the effect of plasma condition on the treatment of low level nuclear waste,we used plasma emission spectroscopy to determine the plasma temperature and also developed a computer code to calculate the plasma temperature. The measure plasma temperature distribution was found to be in good agreement with the theoretical predictions in the investigated operation ranges. It was found that increasing the flow rate will decrease the plasma temperature and move the peak temperature location to downstream regions . In the treatment of mixed resin with silicon oxide grains,it was found that treatment by using argon plasma will produce carbon deposit while the treatment by air plasma will decompose the resin completely.