Dissolution of irradiated fuel from the integral fast reactor

Conference · Fri Dec 31 04:00:00 EST 1993

OSTI ID:141159

Benedict, R W; Teske, G M; Krsul, J R ^[1]

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1. Argonne National Laboratory-West, Idaho Falls, ID (United States)

As part of the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) program, a pyrometallurgical process is being developed to separate the actinide metals from the fission products. The process has principally been developed with depleted uranium-zirconium alloy at engineering scale and uranium-plutonium-zirconium alloy at laboratory scale. Since the effect of irradiation and fission products on the dissolution process was not known, {open_quotes}proof of concept{close_quotes} testing established initial performance data. This paper describes the test equipment and analytical procedures. During the tests, single segments of irradiate fuel were anodically and directly dissolved in an electrorefiner system containing molten salt and cadmium at 500{degrees}C. Results are presented for different alloys and different irradiation levels. Typically, the anodic dissolution process recovered greater than 99.95% of the uranium and 99.99% of the plutonium. Also, the results of fission product behavior during dissolution and future experiment plans are discussed.

• OSTI ID: 141159
• Report Number(s): CONF-930304--; CNN: W-31-109-ENG-38
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

05 NUCLEAR FUELS
22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS
40 CHEMISTRY
ACTINIDES
BENCH-SCALE EXPERIMENTS
DISSOLUTION
EXPERIMENT PLANNING
FISSION PRODUCTS
FUEL CYCLE
IFR REACTOR
NUCLEAR CHEMISTRY
NUCLEAR FUELS
PLUTONIUM ALLOYS
PYROCHEMICAL REPROCESSING
PYROMETALLURGY
SEPARATION PROCESSES
URANIUM BASE ALLOYS
ZIRCONIUM ALLOYS