Waste Treatment by Selective Mineral Ion Exchanger

STMI, subsidiary company of the AREVA Group with over 40 years in the D&D business, has been continuously innovating and developing new decontamination techniques, with the objectives of achieving more efficient decontaminations on a growing spectrum of media. In the field of liquid waste treatment, STMI manufactures uses and commercialises selective inorganic ion exchangers (RAN). These are hydrated synthetic inorganic compounds prepared from very pure raw materials. Different types of RANs (POLYAN, OXTAIN, Fe-Cu, Fe-CoK, Si-Fe-CoK) can be used to trap a large number of radioactive elements in contaminated effluents. Different implementations could be applied depending on technical conditions. STMI’s offers consist in building global solution and preliminary design of installation either in dispersed form (batch) or in column (cartridge filtration). Those products are used all over the world not only in the nuclear business (Canada, US, Belgium, France…) but also in other fields. Indeed, it provides competitive solutions to many domains of application especially water pollution control, liquid waste treatment in the nuclear business by decreasing the activity level of waste. The following paper will focus on the theoretical principle of the mineral exchanger, its implementation and the feed back collected by STMI.