The treatment of alpha waste at EUROCHEMIC by acid digestion - Feed pretreatment and plutonium recovery

This paper describes the contribution of the European Company for the Chemical Processing of Irradiated Fuels (EUROCHEMIC) to a joint project with the German Nuclear Research Center at Karlsruhe (KfK) on the treatment of about 1 ton of non-sorted solid wastes containing a considerable amount of plutonium. In the framework of the project Eurochemic was assigned the tasks to build a facility to pretreat these wastes, and to develop the process and to construct a facility to demonstrate the recovery of plutonium from acid digestion residues generated in an acid digestion process unit to be built by KfK. The pretreatment of the wastes, i.e. segregation of non-combustibles from combustibles, the shredding of the latter, the repacking of both fractions and their plutonium assay, was finished at the end of 1981. A total of 430 packages containing combustibles and fortyfive 28-L drums with non-combustibles were produced