Nuclear Engineering Commons^™

Spectroscopic Methods Of Process Monitoring For Safeguards Of Used Nuclear Fuel Separations, Jamie Lee Warburton

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

To support the demonstration of a more proliferation-resistant nuclear fuel processing plant, techniques and instrumentation to allow the real-time, online determination of special nuclear material concentrations in-process must be developed. An ideal materials accountability technique for proliferation resistance should provide nondestructive, realtime, on-line information of metal and ligand concentrations in separations streams without perturbing the process. UV-Visible spectroscopy can be adapted for this precise purpose in solvent extraction-based separations.

The primary goal of this project is to understand fundamental URanium EXtraction (UREX) and Plutonium-URanium EXtraction (PUREX) reprocessing chemistry and corresponding UV-Visible spectroscopy for application in process monitoring for safeguards. By …

Structure Studies On Lanthanide Technetium Pyrochlores As Prospective Host Phases To Immobilize 99- Technetium And Fission Lanthanides From Effluents Of Reprocessed Used Nuclear Fuels, Thomas Hartmann, Ariana Alaniz

Festival of Communities: UG Symposium (Posters)

We performed a systematic investigation of the incorporation of 99Tc into pyrochlore oxide structures, Ln2Tc2O7, where Ln represents trivalent lanthanide Ln3+ cations, while 99Tc is atetravalent, Tc4+, metal cation. Pyrochlore compounds are high-melting temperature oxides and are recognized for their durability. Our goal in this preliminary study is to characterize and quantify the range of stability of the lanthanum technetium pyrochlore oxide phase. Hereby, powder X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Rietveld analysis were used to determine and characterize the crystalline phase content with high accuracy, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used to characterize the microstructure and homogeneity of the synthesized …