Abstract
This work describes a streamlined approach to the recovery and purification of 234U from aged 238Pu. Key modifications to conventional techniques are described that result in an efficient uranium and plutonium separation process that successfully produced tens of grams of ultrahigh purity 234U at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. A new processing scheme was developed using an anion exchange column run in a cycling mode with HNO3 media as the primary uranium purification process. This was followed with a uranyl peroxide precipitation step to purify and solidify the uranium before conversion to U3O8. Both the traditional uranyl peroxide precipitation method and a new cascade uranyl peroxide precipitation process were used for final purification of the 234U.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 417-424 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry |
| Volume | 327 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2021 |
Funding
Notice: This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan ( http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan ). This research was supported by the US Department of Energy Isotope Program, managed by the Office of Science for Nuclear Physics.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Office of Science for Nuclear Physics | |
| U.S. Department of Energy |
Keywords
- Anion exchange chromatography
- Cascade precipitation
- Uranium purification
- Uranium recovery