June 17th, 2010 | 5:20 pm

AREVA Inaugurates Cold Crucible

Today, at AREVA’s La Hague Facility

The cold crucible in workshop.

Today, at AREVA’s La Hague Facility in France, CEO Anne Lauvergeon inaugurated the cold crucible, celebrating the first use of this advanced technology. This world first for the vitrification for high-level waste has been under development in collaboration with CEA (Atomic Energy Commission) for more than 25 years.

The principle of the cold crucible is to induce electric currents directly in the glass to raise its temperature without heating the crucible. The advantages of the technology include increased frequency of the vitrification, longer equipment life span, and the ability to vitrify wider range of products and reduce the volume of final waste.

Lauvergeon emphasized that “the cold crucible is an illustration of AREVA’s intention to continue and reinforce its research and development policy in order to continue to make innovation available to its customers.”

More information on this major technologic step forward here.

  • meredithangwin

    This is terrific! I am so happy I was at La Hague and saw this.
    When I was in grad school, I dissolved minerals in lead silicate glass in a calorimater to get the enthalpy of solution. I was a student of Ole Kleppa, at University of Chicago.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole_J._Kleppa
    Anyhow, I often wondered what materials those big vitrification crucibles could be made out of that would stand up to the service. In Kleppa's lab, we used platinum for our dissolve-it-in-glass experiments, but platinum is NOT exactly an industrial solution!

    Congratulations on the Cold Crucible and solving an important problem!

  • Guest

    This is very good news. The U-Mo liquid wastes at SPF2 are at long last about to meet their final glass.

    Congratulations !