Russian scientists have created an extractor for efficient and safe processing of nuclear fuel after decommissioning. This was reported by the press service of Moscow State University.
A nuclear power plant is an environmentally friendly source of energy (subject to compliance with construction and operation standards). The only but serious problem arises in the management of its waste – spent nuclear fuel. These wastes were either sent to secure landfills or processed using the Purex process, which extracts uranium and plutonium. But the radioactive actinides, cesium and strontium also remained in the material. Nuclear physicists hope to switch to the most closed fuel cycle to isolate radioactive elements from waste and create new fuel from them. Therefore, the more radioactive material that can be recovered, the better.
The extractor (selective solvent), created at Moscow State University, makes it possible to extract actinides of all valences from spent fuel in a single cycle. The advantage of the proposed technology is the high separation factors and the high capacity of the extractant. Similar schemes are often based on compounds that bind weakly to actinides, which greatly reduces processing efficiency. In addition, the new technology focuses on working in strongly acidic solutions that were originally developed for the Purex process. Therefore, there is no need to further modify existing technologies that generate new waste.
“We were able not only to do a series of extraction experiments, but also to grow crystals of extractable complexes. This makes it possible to obtain information about the transition properties of metals to the organic phase and their binding with the extractant. And this is the best extraction of the structure of the extractor, of a particular actinide group. “Now we continue to actively work in this direction,” said physicist Natalya Borisova.
Formerly engineers invented Quiet propeller for low-noise electric airplanes.
Source: Gazeta
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