Despite its advantages such as safety, unnecessary pretreatment, and decontamination of waste with complex geometry, conventional ultrasonic decontamination technology has been only used to remove loose contaminants, oil and grease, not fixed contaminants due to the limitations in increasing the intensity in the high frequency range. Thus, ultrasound has been used as an auxiliary method to accelerate chemical decontamination of radioactive wastes or chemicals were added to the solution to increase the decontamination efficiency. The recently developed high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) decontamination technology overcomes these limitations by combining multiple frequencies of ultrasonic waves in a specific arrangement, making it possible to remove most fixed contaminants, including radioactive micro particles less than 1 micrometer within half an hour. KEPCO NF and EnesG developed mobile HIFU decontamination equipment and successfully demonstrated the decontamination effect on various radionuclides found in nuclear power plants by treating radioactive metal waste to the level below free release criteria. The mobile HIFU decontamination equipment used in the demonstration can be operated anywhere where water is supplied, including controlled area in nuclear power plants, and is expected to be used widely for decontamination and free release of metal radioactive wastes.

• Manseok Do(KEPCO Nuclear Fuel (KEPCO NF)) Corresponding author
• Jungyoon Han(KEPCO Nuclear Fuel (KEPCO NF))
• Myoungjun Kim(KEPCO Nuclear Fuel (KEPCO NF))
• Jichang Ryu(KEPCO Nuclear Fuel (KEPCO NF))
• Junghwan Hong(KEPCO Nuclear Fuel (KEPCO NF))
• Jungcheol Shin(EnesG Co., Ltd.)
• Unhak Seong(Chungnam National University (CNU))