Idaho National Laboratory (INL)

Idaho National Laboratory (INL) will develop a thermal treatment process for extracting metallic actinides as a group and separating active fission products from used metal fuels. The INL team will leverage the anticipated formation of immiscible (unmixable) liquid layers and subsequent precipitation of solid phases upon cooling to improve the purity of resulting products at a potentially lower cost. A traveling molten zone system will rapidly extract actinides from used metallic fuels. One rapid pass of the molten zone from the bottom to the top of the metallic rod incorporating species of used metallic fuels is expected to realize the expected immiscible layer formation and provide species partitioning data effectively and cleanly. The process’s innovation lies in its simplicity, resistance to proliferation, and potential to produce an ultra-high purity group actinide metal product stream and actinide-free waste streams.