34 Dissolution of Plutonium Dioxide—A Critical Review
Downloaded by UNIV OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 30, 2015 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date: April 16, 1980 | doi: 10.1021/bk-1980-0117.ch034
JACK L. RYAN and L A N E A. BRAY Pacific Northwest Laboratory, Battelle Memorial Institute, Richland, WA 99352
A major problem in the nuclear industry is the dissolution of refractory plutonium dioxide. Of all of the metal oxides capable of producing reasonably concentrated solutions in dilute acids, plutonium dioxide is one of the most, if not the most, difficult to dissolve. The difficult task of dissolution of PuO on a process scale has been largely confined to scrap reprocessing and recovery problems related to plutonium metal production (1) along with some special situations such as in reprocessing of PuO scrap in isotopic generator production. Use of mixed oxide fuels, either in LWR's or in breeder reactors, will require improved methods to dissolve plutonium dioxide for irradiated fuels reprocessing. This is particularly true if fuels are made by blending, pressing, and sintering separately prepared uranium dioxide with plutonium dioxide (the current method of choice of the fuel manufacturers) since this never appears to produce material which is completely converted to solid solution even after irradiation. 2
238
2
Overview of the PuO Dissolution 2
Problem and Methods
Several methods have been studied f o r the d i s s o l u t i o n o f Pu02« The most widely used method in the past is the use of n i t r i c a c i d c o n t a i n i n g a small concentration ( t y p i c a l l y
