Preliminary Mark-18A (Mk-18A) Target Material Recovery Program Product Acceptance Criteria

[摘要] The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) manages an inventory of materials that contains a range of long-lived radioactive isotopes that were produced from the 1960s through the 1980s by irradiating targets in production nuclear reactors at the Savannah River Site (SRS). One reactor was operated in a high-flux mode to produce heavy isotopes for defense purposes, DOE programmatic use, scientific research, and industrial and medical applications. In this reactor, eighty-six Mk-18A (Mk-18A) targets were subjected to long-term high neutron fluxes 47 years ago. Twentyone targets of these were processed to recover ²⁴⁴Pu, heavy curium (i.e., curium rich in ^246-248Cm), and ²⁵²Cf. The plutonium fraction, which was rich in ²⁴⁴Pu, was electromagnetically enriched in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) calutrons to produce gram quantities of ²⁴⁴Pu. This high-purity ²⁴⁴Pu was portioned out to scientists for basic research and for nuclear nonproliferation safeguards programs. The recovered tails (designated as FP-33) contain ²⁴⁴Pu isotopic purities below 20% and are stored at ORNL. The processing of these 21 Mk-18A targets provided the supply of ²⁴⁴Pu and heavy curium in use today. The remaining 65 unprocessed targets are currently in a storage pool at SRS; they contain the world???s remaining supply of unseparated ²⁴⁴Pu and heavy curium.

[发布日期] 2016-09-01

[学科分类] 核能源与工程