The status of international purification process of uranium

The information of international purification process of uranium since 1976 is retrieved by both computer and handwork. The uranium purification processes and parameters in the United States, England, France, Canada, India, Korea, Australia, Pakistan, Brazil, Spain, Philippines, Japan, Argentina and China are summarized. The review show that, in addition to amine extraction in Japan and Argentina, TBP extraction was normally used in the rest countries. In order to reduce the volume of equipment and consumption of reagents, the feed solution with high uranium content (more than 300 g/L uranium) was adopted by almost all countries. During scrubbing of loaded organic phase, the methods using partly returned product liquor were studied in some countries and columns were mainly used as extraction equipment so as to improve the purification efficiency. In some countries, pulp extraction was studied to overcome the difficulties in the process of filtering