Abstract
The first step of the spent nuclear fuel reprocessing is a dissolution of actinides and fission products in hot nitric acid at high concentration. Among all these species, the knowledge of redox plutonium equilibria with discerning between their oxidation states is essential to understand and depended on many chemical conditions. Nevertheless, the knowledge of speciation in this media is a challenge especially for a better understanding of corrosion mechanism in the dissolution medium. Thus this paper proposes to determine the electrochemical behaviour of plutonium and especially the Pu(IV)/Pu(III), Pu(VI)/Pu(V) and Pu(V)/Pu(IV) redox couple in nitric acid media and acquire thermodynamic and kinetic constants at higher temperatures than 25 °C and higher nitric concentration than 1 mol L−1.
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The authors thank AREVA NC for financial support of this study.
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10967_2015_4423_MOESM1_ESM.tif
Fig. A1 Influence of nitric acid concentration on I–E curves of of Pu(IV) (0.01 mol L−1) in nitric acid (1 mol L−1) on primary axis and nitric acid 5 mol L−1 on secondary axis at 25 °C on gold electrode; ν = 10 mV s−1; ω = 0 rpm. Supplementary material 1 (TIFF 353 kb)
10967_2015_4423_MOESM2_ESM.tif
Fig. A2 Evolution of the curve log(I) = f(log(ω)) of Pu(IV)/Pu(III) redox couple for several conditions of temperature and nitric acid concentration. Supplementary material 2 (TIFF 262 kb)
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Fallet, A., Larabi-Gruet, N., Jakab-Costenoble, S. et al. Electrochemical behavior of plutonium in nitric acid media. J Radioanal Nucl Chem 308, 587–598 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10967-015-4423-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10967-015-4423-8