Separation of fission products from spent pressurized water reactor fuels by anion exchange and extraction chromatography for inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometric analysis Original Research Article

A study has been carried out on the separation of fission products from spent pressurized water reactor (PWR) fuels and their quantitative determination using inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES). Plutonium and uranium were separated from fission products using anion exchange and tri-n-butylphosphate (TBP) extraction chromatography, respectively. Americium was separated and fission products such as Sr, Ba, Cd, La, Ce, Pr, Nd, Sm, Eu, Gd and Y were quantitatively recovered using di(2-ethylhexyl)phosphoric acid (HDEHP) extraction chromatography. An ICP-AES/shielding system, which was specially designed and built for the analysis of radioactive materials, was employed and the analytical precision for all metal elements studied was found to be <5%. Three spent PWR fuels whose burnup rates were between 15,000 and 35,000 MWd/MTU were analysed and then the relation between the burnup and the quantity of the fission products was compared to that calculated by burnup code, ORIGEN 2.