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Project Omega and INL to further investigate UNF recycling with ARPA-E award
Nuclear technology start-up Project Omega announced that it has been awarded a contract through the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to advance used nuclear fuel recycling. Project Omega said the award will be used to validate key components of its molten salt electrochemical recycling platform designed to process UNF, recover valuable isotopes, and reduce long-term waste management challenges.
Okan H. Zabunoglu, Bernard I. Spinrad
Nuclear Technology | Volume 93 | Number 3 | March 1991 | Pages 376-381
Technical Paper | Enrichment and Reprocessing System | doi.org/10.13182/NT91-A34531
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A flow sheet for simplified reprocessing of long cooled light water reactor (LWR) fuel is presented. The standard Purex process is modified so that after the first solvent extraction cascade (co-decontamination), plutonium is washed out of the organic phase without reduction. This step also washes out enough uranium that the U-Pu product can be directly used as LWR fuel. A finish partitioning step, with plutonium reduction, decontaminates the remaining uranium product. Neither the U-Pu product nor the uranium product requires further purification, process yields are excellent, and plant equipment can be simplified.