Plutonium processing industry development

Liquid extraction is utilized by a wide variety of industries. Applications include the recovery of aromatics, decaffeination of coffee, recovery of homogeneous catalysts, manufacture of penicillin, recovery of uranium and plutonium, lubricating oil extraction, phenol removal from aqueous wastewater, and extraction of acids from aqueous streams. New applications or refinements of solvent extraction processes continue to be developed. 

In Germany in 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, skeptical of claims by Enrico Fermi and Irene Johot-Curie that bombardment of uranium by neutrons produced new so-called transuranic elements (elements beyond uranium), repeated these experiments and chemically isolated a radioactive isotope of barium. Unable to interpret these findings, Hahn asked Lise Meitner, a physicist and former colleague, to propose an explanation for his observations. Meitner and her nephew, Otto Frisch, showed that it was possible for the uranium nucleus to be spfit into two smaller nuclei by the neutrons, a process that they termed fission. The discovery of nuclear fission eventually led to the development of nuclear weapons and, after World War II, the advent of nuclear power to generate electricity. Nuclear chemists were involved in the chemical purification of plutonium obtained from uranium targets that had been irradiated in reactors. They also developed chemical separation techniques to isolate radioactive isotopes for industrial and medical uses from the fission products wastes associated with plutonium production for weapons. Today, many of these same chemical separation techniques are being used by nuclear chemists to clean up radioactive wastes resulting from the fifty-year production of nuclear weapons and to treat wastes derived from the production of nuclear power. 

Although incineration is used widely for volume reduction of industrial and household combustible waste, the incineration process for plutonium-contaminated waste has required very special development to ensure protection of the operators, efficient ofiF-gas cleaning to protect the environment, and the avoidance of criticality owing to the concentration of plutonium in the ash. An incinerator for this duty now has been operated successfully in the United Kingdom on a pilot-plant scale and it... 

Applicability of SFE to nuclear fuel reprocessing has been proposed by Smart and Wai et al. (17, 18). We have developed a new process which employs a high pressure mixture of TBP-HNO3-H2O-CO2 as is described in this chapter and this approach has indicated a very efEcient extraction of uranium from UO2. Now, the nuclear industries have paid attention to the applications of SFE to future processes. In Japan, we have started a four-year project with nuclear plant construction companies to demonstrate uranium and plutonium extraction from a mixed oxide fuel using the high pressure mixture. On the other hand, uranium and plutonium will be extracted from the irradiated nuclear fuel with TBP(HN03)i.s(H20)o.6 in the same project. 

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