Metal-Encapsulated, Polymer-Containing Halide Salt Composites as Potential Long-Term Hosts for Radioiodine: Evaluating Halmets, Polyhalmets, and Halcermets

This paper presents composite waste form concepts for radioiodine immobilization including halide-metal (<i>halmet</i>) composites, polymer-halide-metal (<i>polyhalmet</i>) composites, and halide-ceramic-metal (<i>halcermet</i>) composites with data from experiments to evaluate these ideas. The encapsulant metal of choice for the pellets was Bi⁰, and a cold-press-and-sinter approach was used for creating the pellets. A polymer (i.e., polyacrylonitrile or PAN) phase was included in some composite forms because this porous, passive polymer is used as a host matrix for active chemisorption-based getters. Metals of Ag⁰, Bi⁰, and Cu⁰ were separately embedded into PAN beads, which were loaded with iodine in static tests. Included are details of experiments where PAN removal from the iodine-loaded composite beads was evaluated to reduce the overall volume of the final waste requiring immobilization and to improve the thermal stability of the final composite form. While these experiments demonstrate new concepts for radioiodine immobilization, more work is needed to fully understand the limitations of these approaches and further optimizations are needed before implementation at larger scales is feasible.