A major purpose of the Technical Information Center is to provide the broadest dissemination possible of information contained in DOE's Research and Development Reports to business, industry, the academic community, and federal, state and local governments.Although a small portion of this report is not reproducible, it is being made available to expedite the availability of information on the research discussed herein. 101 4. Waste Treatment Processes 104 D. Plutonium Residue Recovery 109 V. APPLIED PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY 113 A. Fission Product Release from Core-Concrete Melts 113 1. Experimental Methods 113 2. Calculational Methods 114 3. Results and Discussion 115 4. Conclusions 118
IVExperimental effort is also underway to investigate the effect of ionizing radiation on the potential for gas generation in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) site. In this report period, experiments were initiated to determine the extent that nonbiodegradable plastics present in the WIPP waste canister will be radiolytically converted to biodegradable material.Integral Fast Reactor Pyrochemical Process. The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) is an advanced reactor concept proposed by, and under development at, Argonne. One of its distinguishing features is an "integral" fuel cycle in which the discharged reactor core and blanket materials are processed and fabricated into new fuel elements in an on-site facility. The CMT Division has the responsibility for developing the on-site process for recovering plutonium and uranium from the core and blanket, removing fission products, reenriching the core alloy with plutonium bred in the blanket, and immobilizing fission product wastes in suitable media for disposal.The reference process for initial operation of the electrorefiner in the fuel cycle facility utilizes anodic dissolution of spent binary fuel (U-10 wf % Zr) in a molten chloride electrolyte salt and collection of uranium products on a solid cathode. The anodic dissolution of binary fuel has been successfully demonstrated at the 10 kg per batch level and is now a routine operation. In addition, both single mandrel and multipin solid cathodes have been successfully used to deposit uranium at the 10 kg per batch level. Experimental research efforts included determination of parameters that control deposition rate, transport efficiency, and product composition. Additional experiments demonstrated the feasibility of using a liquid cadmium cathode for collecting a U-Pu product. Also, development work on an alternative method (direct chemical reduction) for collecting a U-Pu product was initiated. This method employs a lithium reductaut to reduce PuCl 3 and UC1 3 out of the molten electrolyte and deposit the metal in the cadmium pool. Results of four experiments, with varying degrees of success, have demonstrated the potential of this method. F v pertinents have been conducted to demonstrate purification and consolidation of liquid cadmium cathode products. The starting compositions for these experiments were selected to simulate the expect...