Abstract:
Radioactive contamination is one of the problems that the society is generally concerned about. It will not only cause huge damage to the ecological environment, but also cause serious damage to human health. Uranium mining and metallurgy in China is characterized by complex process and numerous employees, the radioactive contamination generated is more urgent to be treated. In order to recycle and utilize equipment and sites for uranium mining, reduce the amount of radioactive solid waste and the cost of waste disposal, it is necessary to effectively decontaminate radioactive waste and sites to meet national standards. The main methods of decontamination are physical and chemical decontamination. Physical decontamination has low environmental requirements, simple processes, and low costs, but it can damage the surface of objects. The ultrasonic method has the least damage to the surface of the object and is easy to operate. The chemical cleaning time is short, and the cleaning agent is easy to produce and can be reused, but its process is complex. There are many nuclear facilities in use in China, and the current decontamination technologies have certain limitations. It is urgent to develop new decontamination processes for radioactive contamination, as well as complex decontamination technologies and special decontamination agents with high decontamination rates. Find out a set of economic, fast and simple radioactive contamination decontamination technology suitable for China, so that China’s decontamination technology will develop towards complex and efficient. In this paper, ultrasonic and chemical methods were used to remove uranium radioactive contamination on the surface of steel sheets. The effects of detergent types, mass fraction, ultrasound parameters, and surface active agents on the decontamination rate were studied. The results show that the auxiliary decontamination rate is best when the ultrasonic parameters are 45 kHz and 490 W. When organic chelators are used, the decontamination rate is stronger than acido-base decontamination agents. The highest decontamination rate is 96.1% when 1 g/L of EDTA-2Na is used. When sodium stearate and disodium ethylene diamine tetraacetate are combined, the decontamination rate significantly increases to 99.79%, the detergent can still reach a detergent rate of more than 95% after repeated use 12 times. Finally, a radioactive detergent with good decontamination rate, low corrosivity and low cost is synthesized, which has important guiding significance for the decontamination of radioactive contamination on the surface of nuclear facilities.