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May 31–June 3, 2026
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What’s the most difficult question you’ve been asked as a maintenance instructor?
Blye Widmar
"Where are the prints?!"
This was the final question in an onslaught of verbal feedback, comments, and critiques I received from my students back in 2019. I had two years of instructor experience and was teaching a class that had been meticulously rehearsed in preparation for an accreditation visit. I knew the training material well and transferred that knowledge effectively enough for all the students to pass the class. As we wrapped up, I asked the students how they felt about my first big system-level class, and they did not hold back.
“Why was the exam from memory when we don’t work from memory in the plant?” “Why didn’t we refer to the vendor documents?” “Why didn’t we practice more on the mock-up?” And so on.
Jukka Lehto, Leena Brodkin, Risto Harjula, Esko Tusa
Nuclear Technology | Volume 127 | Number 1 | July 1999 | Pages 81-87
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A2985
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
SrTreat is an inorganic ion exchanger whose structure is based on a sodium titanate. It is available in granular form and is suitable for use in packed-bed operations. This exchanger has proved to be highly effective in the removal of radioactive strontium from alkaline nuclear waste solutions. SrTreat was used for the first time in an industrial-scale separation process in 1996 in Murmansk, Russia. During that operation 2500 bed volumes of low-active (22 kBq/l) waste solution with a moderate salt concentration was decontaminated from 90Sr with an average decontamination factor of 7400. The exchanger is especially suited for the decontamination of alkaline concentrated sodium nitrate solutions that are characteristic of neutralized stored wastes from some nuclear-fuel-reprocessing plants.At the Japanese Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI), a new radionuclide-removal system, successfully utilizing SrTreat for the removal of 90Sr (7.4 GBq/l) from a neutralized alkaline reprocessing waste solution, was commissioned in the summer of 1997. In the laboratory-scale tests with a JAERI simulant, adjusted to pH 10 and having 2.4 mol/l of NaNO3, strontium could be removed from more than 1000 bed volumes with an SrTreat column, thereby obtaining a decontamination factor between 2000 and 15 000. In addition to the performance of SrTreat columns in strontium removal, basic studies on the ion exchange equilibrium of strontium on SrTreat and the effects of pH and interfering cations on strontium exchange are discussed.
