Ion Exchange Modeling Of Cesium Removal From Hanford Waste Using Spherical Resorcinol-Formaldehyde Resin

This report discusses the expected performance of spherical Resorcinol-Formaldehyde (RF) ion exchange resin for the removal of cesium from alkaline Hanford radioactive waste. Predictions of full scale column performance in a carousel mode are made for the Hot Commissioning, Envelope B, and Subsequent Operations waste compositions under nominal operating conditions and for perturbations from the nominal. Only the loading phase of the process cycle is addressed in this report. Pertinent bench-scale column tests, kinetic experiments, and batch equilibrium experiments are used to estimate model parameters and to benchmark the ion-exchange model. The methodology and application presented in this report reflect the expected behavior of spherical RF resin manufactured at the intermediate-scale (i.e., approximately 100 gallon batch size; batch 5E-370/641). It is generally believed that scale-up to production-scale in resin manufacturing will result in similarly behaving resin batches whose chemical selectivity is unaffected while total capacity per gram of resin may vary some. As such, the full-scale facility predictions provided within this report should provide reasonable estimates of production-scale column performance.