New reprocessing system for spent nuclear reactor fuel using fluoride volatility method

Our proposed spent nuclear fuel reprocessing technology named FLUOREX, which is a hybrid system using fluoride volatility and solvent extraction, meets the requirements of the future thermal/fast breeder reactors (coexistence) cycle. We have been done semi-engineering and engineering scale experiments on the fluorination of uranium, purification of UF₆, pyrohydrolysis of fluorination residues, and dissolution of pyrohydrolysis samples in order to examine technical and engineering feasibilities for implementing FLUOREX. We found that uranium in spent fuels can be selectively volatilized by fluorination in the flame type reactor, and the amount of uranium volatilized is adjusted from 90% to 98% by changing the amount of F₂ supplied to the reactor. The volatilized uranium is purified using UO₂F₂ adsorber for plutonium and purification methods such as condensation and chemical traps for fission products provide a decontamination factor of over 10⁷. Most of the fluorination residues that consist of non-volatile fluorides of uranium, plutonium, and fission products are converted to oxides by pyrohydrolysis at 600-800 °C. Although some fluorides of fission products such as alkaline earth metals and lanthanides are not converted completely and fluorine is discharged into the solution, oxides of U and Pu obtained by pyrohydrolysis are dissolved into nitric acid solution because of the low solubility of lanthanide fluorides. These results support our opinion that FLUOREX has great possibilities for being a part of the future spent nuclear fuel cycle system.