Extracting individual elements from spent nuclear fuel rods? 10 points?

Question

I saw it on the Science Channel once. It was about how Argonne Laboratories was using some process to actually extract stable, nonradioactive elements from spent nuclear fuel rods. Is this true? If so, can someone help me find an article on it. I can't quite seem to find it. Thanks! 10 points for best answer!

Answer 1

There are various ways to extract some elements from other elements.  I am not familiar with the specific techniques used for spent reactor fuel but I can give you some places to look...

Distillation works well when the vapor pressure of the elements are different.  Magnetic separation is great if one component is magnetic.  Wet chemistry offers a huge variety of methods:  solvent which disolves one but not the other, solvent dissolves everything and then use ion exchange or selective precipitation or electroplating/electrolysis or fractional crystallization or separation by mass (centrifuge) or semi-permiable membranes.  There are even biological processes, some micro-organisms or some plants will chemically convert some compounds and not others.

It also depends on how much separation you want.  If you are just enriching one with respect to the other, that is relatively easy.  If you are trying to make one relatively pure compared to the other, how pure does it need to be  99.9% or 99.99999%

The whole field of extractive metallurgy is vast and has been around a very long time (see alchemy).

Sorry this is not a specific answer.

Answer 2

Sure, they were either talking about UREX process or pyroprocessing. I've included links to the Argonne website for each of the two processes.

http://www.cmt.anl.gov/Science_and_Techn...

http://www.cmt.anl.gov/Science_and_Techn...

Also FYI it Argonne National Laboratory (singular)

Answer 3

Well that depends on the end products after reaction... If its usefull they gonna extract if not reject...