Envirocare has received shipments from 23 DOE sites. The focus area also renegotiated the cooperative agreement to allow Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to ship 60,000 pounds of radioactive lead, the site's entire inventory. After passing through an off-gas system of an incineration process, fly ash is what remains. Ash stabilization is one of the focus area's 24 technology deficiencies in treating mixed waste. See article about chemically bonded phosphate ceramics in this issue.
Acid digestion is another wet oxidation technology.
Operating below 200 o C and at atmospheric pressure, the process treats heterogeneous waste with a nitric-phosphoric acid. Treated residues are immobilized readily using phosphate ceramic solidification. A license agreement has been negotiated between Westinghouse Savannah River Company and CeraChem, a private company. MWFA is supporting the bench-scale demonstration of direct chemical oxidation as a unique omnivorous destruction process for organic solids and liquids. Using acidified ammonium peroxydisulfate solutions, the process does not require any toxic or expensive catalysts for bulk destruction.