Nondestructive decontamination of mortar and concrete by electro-kinetic methods: application to the extraction of radioactive heavy metals.
Because the service lives of nuclear power plants are limited to a certain number of years, the need for the management of quite a large volume of radioactive contaminated concrete arises, which, in most cases, was not taken into account when the capacities of the low and medium activity repositories were designed. Therefore, the decontamination of these structures would be of great interest in order to declassify the wastes as radioactive and manage them as conventional ones. This research studies the reliability of the application of electrical fields to decontaminate radioactive contaminated concrete. Three series of decontamination experiments have been carried out, using Cs+, Sr2-, Co2+, and Fe3+ ions added during casting and that have penetrated from the outside, testing carbonated and uncarbonated matrixes, and using laboratory devices as well as the homemade device for in situ application named "honeycomb device". As a result, the application of electrical fields to concrete-contaminated structures has been developed as a new technique to extract radioactive ionic species from concrete. This method of decontamination has been patented by ENRESA (Spanish Company for the Management of Radioactive Wastes) in association with the IETcc.