Plutonium processing engineering

Stanley G. Thompson joined my group on October 1, 1942 and it fell to his lot to discover the process that was chosen for use at Clinton Laboratories (in Tennessee) and the Hanford Engineer Works (in the state of Washington) for the separation of plutonium from uranium and the immense intensity of radioactive fission products with which it was produced in the nuclear chain reactors. Again I turn to my journal to tell the story ... 

Phil Horwitz asked me to comment on what I saw as potential disadvantages of the various plutonium pyrochemical processes extolled by speakers in the Tuesday sessions. I, too, am a fan of pyrochemical techniques. I recognize that pyrochemical processes for Pu processing are just in their infancy - on batch plant-scale. To be truly useful, such processes need to be operated on a continuous basis. Scientists and engineers concerned with such technology need to develop equipment and procedures required to operate pyrochemical processes in a cost-effective, continuous manner."... 

Components in the process of design and fabrication of ceramic plutonium fuels at Hanford Engineering Development Laboratory (HEDL) are displayed in Figure 5. The plan for the fuel fabrication demonstration facility at HEDL is shown in Figure 6. 

The present work at Rocky Flats is an extension of the Argonne work and is directed to development of a proliferation resistant pyrochemical process for LMFBR fuels. This article describes a conceptual pyrochemical process and preliminary engineering concepts for coprocessing uranium and plutonium in spent LMFBR core-axial blanket and radial blanket fuels using the Salt Transport Process. 

Richardson, G. L., and Swanson, J. L., "Plutonium Partitioning in the Purex Process with Hydrazine-Stabilized Hydroxyl-amine Nitrate," Report HEDL-TME-75-31, Hanford Engineering Development Lab., Richland, WA, 1975. 

The classical Purex process was designed to produce nearly pure uranium and plutonium. The Chemical Engineering Division of Argonne National Laboratory has demonstrated UREX+, an advanced aqueous process with five extraction trains that split commercial reactor spent fuel into five streams 1) a nearly pure uranium stream (95.5% of the heavy metal in the spent fuel) 2) technetium sent to transmutation (0.08 /o) 3) Pu/Np converted to MOX fuel for LWR fuel and Am/Cm for transmutation or fast-flux reactor fuel (0.962 /o) 4) Cs/Sb decay heat producers sent to interim decay storage (0.017 /o) and 5) a mixed fission product stream (3.44 /o) composed of gases and solids incorporated into a waste form for geological repository disposal.f The percentages shown are computed from Table 1. 

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