Metal vapor generation by electron beam

Insoluble residue yielded in the dissolution process of spent fuels with hot nitric acid is presently managed as radioactive wastes, while including substantial amount of scarce materials such as platinum metals. The advent of laser isotope separation technique exerted a strong impetus on the development for recovering valuable non-radioactive isotopes from the waste. This is one of the important objectives in the Phenix Project on which PNC is to embark as its new series of R and D's. Since the most suitable process to separate isotopes of these metals as well uranium is considered to be the photoionization using metal vapor, as a working material, an experimental investigation has been carried out on the evaporation phenomena of several metals irradiated by the electron beam. This report gives the experimental results on the energy flow in evaporant heating, the vapor stream density distribution and the effect of collimators on the vapor stream, which serve as a basis of the application of EB evaporation technique to the photoionization process. (author)