Separation of curium and americium from spent fuel reprocessing solutions via displacement complexing chromatography on sulfocationites

Abstract

The process of curium and americium separation from solutions after spent fuel reprocessing by displacement complexing chromatography on sulfonic cation exchange resins was reported. Separation runs were performed using a 2-stage chromatographic process sequence. Stage 1 constituted the primary purification and produced the enriched trans-plutonium elements (TPE) concentrate by means of removing the principal quantity of light rare earth elements, namely, La, Ce, Nd, and Pr. Deep refining of the TPE concentrate from the residual chemical and radiochemical impurities was performed at Stage 2. The paper reports the results of three experimental cycles of americium and curium separation. The best results were obtained in Cycle 3, where the key factor was the application of the monodispersed Tokem-308 cationite. The purity of curium in the fraction containing 50% of the feed curium-244 was 99% relative to americium. About 60% of the enriched americium-241,243 fraction contained < 0.1% of Eu-154,155 by radioactivity and < 0.8% of Cm-244 by mass.