ORTEF - Organic Telluride formation During a Severe Nuclear accident

Research Project, 2022 – 2023

The proposed work focuses on the potential formation of volatile organic telluride species under severe accident conditions. Tellurium related projects have been of interest during the last few years, and recent reseach has provided valuable information about the behavior of tellurium inside the containment. VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd has a stong background in severe accident research and they have developed experimental setups suitable for investigating the transport and behavior of fission products in severe accident conditions. Chalmers University of Technology has been in the forefront of experimental severe accident chemistry research for the past years, and has provided important data on the source term of several different fission products. As a third partner, the University of Oslo will participate in this work by offering their expert knowledge on the analysis of experiments by organizing the neutron activation analysis of the samples. The experiments proposed in this project aim to investigate the effects of organic material on tellurium behavior. Previously, organic material has been shown to have a significant effect on iodine volatilization via formation of organic iodides. However, there is no information in regards to tellurium. Therefore, the aim of this work is to examine whether organic tellurides can be formed from solid tellurium and organic material in gas phase, and whether organic material can have an effect on tellurium volatility and overall source term.