Conditioning spent fuels from research nuclear reactor in ceramic dies

The problem of immobilizing nuclear wastes is a complex one and is vitally important in the nuclear fuels cycle. In the case of spent elements from research reactors, the presence of large amounts of aluminum makes the procedure more complex and, therefore, onerous. There are various alternatives proposed for processing these materials. Two methods were studied in the Nuclear Materials Division for obtaining, as a final product, a vitreous block that could be place definitively in a geological repository. The processes are briefly, as follows: 1.By mechanical and chemical processes eliminating all the exterior aluminum from the fuel plates and then placing the product which we will call 'meat' (with some additional treatment and mixing with the amount needed to produce a natural uranium compound or weakened by decreasing the isotope enrichment in U-235) in a vitreous matrix. 2.Mechanically eliminate the aluminum from the exterior frame (as shown below) by shearing and cutting off the sectors containing only the Al, but leaving the rest of the aluminum, a big part of which is still present (4511.03), then doing the same procedure as in the case above: mixing with a natural uranium compound or weakening and vitrifying this mixture. In both cases, the vitrification can be carried out by fusion as well as by sintering. Given that these methods imply a big increase in volume together with a big mass of uranium and an even bigger amount of glass we decided to study an alternative. The proposed process involves synthesizing the mixtures obtained from the pre-treatment of the fuel plates (as described later) with natural isotope uranium oxide in order to obtain a block with the appropriate properties for its final disposal in a deep geological repository (CW)