Team:Lyon-INSA-ENS/Project/Industrialization

Industrialization

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Why a Cobalt Biofilter ? (Team's technology watch)

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The “Cobalt Buster” project is based on a modified ''Esherichia coli'' strain able to capture and concentrate cobalt from its environment. The use of this strain as a biofilter may increase the life of ion exchange resins and reduce significantly costs and volumes of radioactive waste which is a major preocupation of nuclear industry. A previous modelization estimated that :

4 kg of modified bacteria = 8000 kg of ion exchange resins

It is known that a pulse of radioactive Cobalt emission occurs in the primary circuit of water, during the maintenance of nuclear power plants when they open the reactor core. This pulse damages the ion exchange resin used to filter the water and reduce its radioactive level.

That is why we first thought using the "Cobalt Buster" biofilter upstream the ion exchange resin during the rehabilitation of primary circuit effluents in nuclear power plants.

Mettre ici la video de Margaux sur le prototype de biofiltre

Why not in the primary circuit ? (Experts advice)

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During the project development we organized a lot of meetings with nuclear industry actors.

To know more about the operation of nuclear power plants we visited the nuclear power plant of Tricastin. We also visited the Nuclear centre for processing and conditioning low-level radioactive waste(CENTRACO)to learn more about the constraints of nuclear waste processing

Thanks to our partner Assystem we met nuclear experts who provided us additional informations, and it appeared that our biofilter cannot be use for the primary circuit effluents treatment

They gi