Grouped recovery of actinides from irradiated metallic fuel by electrorefining in molten LiCL-KCL on solid reactive and inert cathodes

The presented work is part of an experimental campaign on a laboratory-scale demonstration of an electrorefining process for homogeneous recovery of all actinides from spent metallic nuclear fuel. In this process, the fuel is anodically dissolved to a molten chloride salt, while solid aluminium cathodes are used for a grouped-selective deposition of the actinides from this electrolyte in a form of actinide-aluminium alloys. The demonstration experiments are being carried out since 2011, using an irradiated metallic fuel METAPHIX. The fuel is based on U-Pu-Zr alloy, it was fabricated in JRC Karlsruhe in collaboration with CRIEPI, Japan, and irradiated in the PHENIX reactor. The work continued the experiments on comparison of the usability of solid reactive aluminium and inert cathodes for homogeneous recovery of all actinides. In addition, the percentage of the actinides oxidized from the fuel without dissolution of Zr in dependency on the applied current density was investigated, as well as a mass balance and behaviour of Zr during the process allowing non selective anodic oxidation of the fuel.

SOUCEK Pavel;  MURAKAMI Tsuyoshi;  URUGA Kazuyoshi;  MALMBECK Rikard;  RODRIGUES Alcide;  TSUKADA T.;  VAN WINCKEL Stefaan;  GLATZ Jean-Paul; 

2018-01-12

Korean Radioactive Waste Society (KRS)

JRC106590

http://www.global2017.org/,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC106590,