When it comes to dismantling nuclear power plants, metals fall into 3 main parts:
• A great deal of the metal is free of any residual radioactivity. It will therefore go through a conventional recycling process.
• Another portion is too contaminated or activated to be processed or recycled. It will be categorized as radioactive waste and sent to a radioactive waste disposal facility
• The third and final part – which represents significant volumes – has a limited level of remaining radioactivity from activation and fission products, allowing it to be recycled by melting the steel. This process can reduce or remove radionuclides allowing the steel to be reused or recycled and therefore reduce the quantity of radioactive waste and its associated cost. Within this context, SCK CEN has launched, together with CRM, a new project, called SMELD for “State of the art Metal Melting Limiting waste during D&D”. Using a laboratory melting furnace, one of the objective of SMELD is to get a better understanding of the movements of certain radioisotopes during the melting process that will help determining parameters/methods during melting to optimize the process, i.e. to reduce the radioactive waste quantity and improve the circular economy.
Within this context, applicants are invited for a full-time Postdoctoral Research Position to work on the new dynamic SMELD project.
This Post-doc study aims to apply the state-of-the-art thermochemical modelling tools such as FactSage, Thermo-Calc, and HSC etc. to investigate metal melting process in order to extract valuable metal. Although the pyrometallurgy in traditional steel industry is well known and largely studied, the information on the behavior of the radionuclides in remelted steels is limited. The objective is to model the partitioning of phases in metal melting according to the particular process parameter and to identify and model phase relations at the boundaries of thermodynamical equilibria . The modelling results will be used to guide remelting processes at various stages in order to optimize pyrometallurgy conditions facilitating re-partitioning and/or concentrating identified radionuclides towards preferred phases. As the optimized conditions must be eventually applicable to a semi- or an industrial scale remelting facility kinetic conditions must also be accounted for.
Het vereiste minimumdiploma van de kandidaat
- PhD
De vereiste achtergrondkennis van de kandidaat
- <p>Pyrometallurgy</p> <p>Material sciences</p>