Am/Cm target glass durability dependence on pH (U). Revision 1

At the Westinghouse Savannah River Company near Aiken, South Carolina, a process is being developed to safely vitrify all of the highly radioactive americium/curium (Am/Cm) material and a portion of the other fissile actinide materials stored on site. One goal of this campaign is to provide Oak Ridge National Laboratory with the excess Am/Cm so it can be recycled as opposed to simply disposing of it as waste. The vitrification will allow safe transportation of the Am/Cm to Oak Ridge as well as safe storage once it arrives. The Am/Cm Target glass being used in this project has been specifically designed to be extremely durable in aqueous environments while it can be selectively attacked by nitric acid to recover the valuable Am and Cm isotopes. Similar glass compositions could be used for storage and retrieval of other actinides on the WSRC site. Previous reports have presented the time, temperature, and compositional dependence of the Am/Cm glass durability. This paper will show results from a pH study on the Am/Cm Target glass durability. The data indicate that the Am/Cm Target Glass durability decreases as pH decreases from a neutral reading. These findings support the extraction of the valuable isotopes from the glass using nitric acid