[en] The long-lived elements in the spent nuclear fuels are mostly actinides, some fission products and activation products. To be able to destroy the long-lived elements in a transmutation process they must be separated from the rest of the spent nuclear fuel. The most difficult separations to obtain are the one between trivalent actinides and lanthanides, due to their relatively similar chemical properties, and the one between different actinides themselves. Solvent extraction is an efficient and well-known method that makes it possible to obtain separation factors that fulfil the highly set demands on purity of the separated phases and on small losses. Chalmers Univ. of Technology is involved in research regarding the separation of actinides and lanthanides and between the actinides themselves as a partner in the European Union project PARTNEW. This project was a part of the fifth framework programme and was concluded in September 2003, but the work is continued in the sixth framework programme under the acronym EUROPART (start January 2004). We mainly cooperate with the Univ. of Reading, which send us new nitrogen containing ligands for evaluation of their extraction properties. The main focus is to understand the basic chemistry of these systems but also to study some process behaviour for future full-scale plants