Use of hybrid resin to reduce silica from spent fuel pool borated water of power plant at pilot scale

Removal of silica from the borated water of primary systems of the nuclear power plant remains a long-term challenge for the industry. The same was tried to solve by membrane technology, however, membrane technology has its issues like generations of additional radioactive wastes. To address this issue a specialized hybrid resin for selective silica removal from borated water was prepared and tested for its efficiency at a pilot scale on an inventory taken from the spent fuel pool of an operational nuclear power plant having 2110 ppm boron and 400 ppb silica. The developed hybrid resin technique offers a simple and easy procedure to overcome several problems encountered in other methods of silica removal such as additional equipment, additional waste handling and maintenance. The validation shows that the application of the developed technique has a silica removal efficiency of 38% without affecting boron concentration.