Solubility of actinide surrogates in nuclear glasses

Plutonium Feed Impurity Testing in Lanthanide Borosilicate (LaBS) Glass

“…The HfO 2 crystallites appear brighter in this backscattered electron image due to their higher average atom mass, and Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS) confirmed that the concentration of Hf in this crystallites was much higher than the surrounding glass matrix. The basis for the use of HfO 2 as a surrogate for PuO 2 in borosilicate glasses from a solubility perspective has been documented [8]. Therefore, insolubility of HfO 2 at these concentrations is not unexpected since the solubility limit of PuO 2 in LaBS glass was found to be 13.4 wt % [1].…”

Plutonium Solubility in High-Level Waste Alkali Borosilicate Glass

“…Glass melts were made with a SB2/SB3 Slurry Mix Evaporator (SME) a simulant and SB6 SME simulant both using hafnium oxide as a PuO 2 surrogate. Testing has shown that HfO 2 is the best surrogate for PuO 2 in glasses from solubility and glass structure perspectives (Lopez, 2003;Shiryaev, 2009). The SB2/SB3 simulant was on hand and available for initial testing.…”

Synthesis and Optimization of the Sintering Kinetics of Actinide Nitrides

“…Accordingly, the sintering of actinide nitrides has been studied by many authors in support of research related to previous reactor work [5, 6, 8, 9, 11-14, 43, 44, 46-48, 53-57, 60, 61, 63, 65, 67, 68, 71, 112-125]. Such previous reactor work relates to various breeder reactors (liquid-metal-fast-breeder reactors (LMFBRs)), space power reactors, and fast reactors considered for the advanced fuel cycle such as: the gascooled fast reactor (GFR), the sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR), and the lead-cooled fast reactor (LFR)) [15,24,56,64,65]. It is apparent that the density of nitride fuel pellets for minor actinide transmutation has yet to be optimized from the reviewed literature.…”