Research for immobilizing iodine waste with two types of borosilicate composite materials

Developing an effective method to immobilize iodine waste has always been our ultimate goal. In this research, we use two methods (A: raw materials (B ₂O ₃, Bi ₂O ₃, ZnO, SiO ₂ ) directly mixed with iodine waste to generate composite materials, B: raw materials are firstly synthesized into glass powders, then we mixed the glass powders with the iodine waste to generate composite materials) to immobilize iodine waste. There were about six phases in method A while only AgI peak appeared in method B. And SEM-EDS results for method A and B indicated that AgI existed in both encapsulated and dispersed distribution form and the XPS indicated the same chemical valence state and chemical environment. The variation of [BO ₃], [BO ₄] and [SiO ₄ ] in FT-IR illustrated that the structure of the composite materials were mainly boron glass network and silica glass network for method A and B, respectively. The rest of iodine content for method A and B were 97.7% and 92.7% compared to the original sample. And the iodine leaching rate were 10 ⁻⁷ and 10 ⁻⁶ respectively. Comparing the values of the rest of iodine content and leaching rate, we consider the method A could be a potential method to treat iodine waste.