Spent nuclear fuels contain significant quantities of three of the platinum-group metals—ruthenium, rhodium, and palladium—plus a related element, technetium, which is nearly absent in nature. Applications for the ruthenium, rhodium, and palladium are well established, and, since the supply of these and other noble metals is largely from foreign sources, they are considered strategic materials. Thus, there is considerable incentive to recover them from nuclear fuels. The technical feasibility of using fission product (FP) noble metals extensively in industry depends on resolution of three major problems: 1. They must be thoroughly decontaminated from all other radioactive materials in the waste stream. 2. They must be separated from one another in very high purity because of internal decay processes. 3. Applications selected must provide appropriate control of radioactivity or the radioisotopes must be removed by isotope-separation techniques or normal decay. Lead extraction as a method for recovering palladium, rhodium, and ruthenium from FP mixtures is examined. In this method, the mixture of FP oxides is combined with glass-forming chemicals, a metal oxide such as lead oxide (PbO) (called a scavenging agent), and a reducing agent such as charcoal. When this mixture is melted, a metal button is formed, which extracts the noble metals. The remainder of the melt cools to form a glass that may be suitable for nuclear waste storage. Lead oxide was found to be the most promising of the potential scavengers. It was reduced by all of the reducing agents tested, and higher density of lead may facilitate the separation of the metal from the glass. Use of PbO also appeared to have no detrimental effect on the glass quality. Charcoal was identified as the preferred reducing agent for technical and economic reasons. As long as a separable metal phase was formed in the melt, noble-metal recovery was not dependent on the amount of reducing agent and scavenger oxide (PbO, SrO, CuO, Bi2O3, Sb2O3) used in these experiments. Not all reducing agents studied (graphite, charcoal, silicon, flour, cornstarch, and sugar), however, were able to reduce all scavenger oxides to metal. Only graphite would reduce SnO and CuO and allow noble-metal recovery. The scavenger oxides Sb2O3, Bi2O3, and PbO, however, were reduced by all of the reducing agents tested. Similar noble-metal recovery was found with each. Although detailed evaluation of the waste-storage-related properties of the glass was beyond the scope of this work, the glass was briefly investigated. Glasses in which PbO was used as the scavenging agent were found to be homogeneous in appearance. In addition, the resistance to leaching of the glass tested was found to be close to that of certain waste glasses. Environmental risks from the lead in the waste glass were not evaluated.