NUCLEAR FUEL
Developing New Processes

Remote manipulation technology was initially developed at ORNL for nuclear fuel reprocessing.

During World War II, Oak Ridge's Graphite Reactor was operated as a pilot plant to demonstrate plutonium production. ORNL researchers developed chemical processes to separate plutonium from spent uranium fuel and fission products. They designed and applied processes using precipitation to extract plutonium from spent fuel dissolved in nitric acid.

Subsequently, research by John Swartout and Frank Steahly had a profound impact on reprocessing. They favored the more efficient solvent-extraction technique being developed at ORNL. It used nitric acid and tri-butyl phosphate dissolved in an organic liquid to extract uranium and plutonium and separate them from fission products. This technique became the Purex (Plutonium/URanium EXtraction) process, still used worldwide to recover uranium and plutonium from spent fuel reactor fuels.

In the ensuing decades, ORNL teams headed by Floyd Culler, Frank Bruce, Raymond Wymer, William Unger, and others set the pace in designing and piloting nuclear fuel reprocessing plants using the Purex process. The designs became the basis for immense reprocessing plants built at Idaho Falls, Hanford, Savannah River, and elsewhere throughout the world.

During the late 1970s and 1980s ORNL advanced nuclear fuel reprocessing technology by developing more efficient equipment for dissolving spent fuels, controlling hazardous gaseous effluents, and performing solvent-extraction operations. Although ORNL's plans for recovering plutonium from the never-built Clinch River Breeder Reactor were canceled in the mid-1980s, many of its advanced techniques were employed in Europe and Japan.

ORNL-developed processes have been used worldwide to extract uranium from ores for electricity production. In the 1950s and 1960s a team led by Keith Brown developed methods for recovering uranium from ore. In the early 1980s Fred Hurst devised a method for extracting uranium from phosphoric acid. These techniques are the standard methods for recovering uranium for use in nuclear power plants.

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