Chlorination of UO and (U,Zr)O solid solution using MoCl

Sato, Takumi  ; Shibata, Hiroki ; Hayashi, Hirokazu ; Takano, Masahide ; Kurata, Masaki 

In order to explore the applicability of the chlorination by MoCl as a potential pretreatment technique for waste treatment of fuel debris by pyrochemical methods, chlorination experiments of UO and (UZr)O simulated fuel debris were carried out in two steps: the first one is a chlorination reaction by homogeneous heating, the second one is a volatilization of molybdenum by-product by heating under temperature gradient condition. Most of UO and (UZr)O powder were converted to UCl or UCl and ZrCl mixture at 573 K, respectively. In the case of (UZr)Osintered particle, most of sample was converted to the chlorides because the products evaporated and be separated from sample surface at 773 K, while only the surface of the sample disk was converted to the chlorides at 573 and 673 K. Most of molybdenum by-product and ZrCl were separated from UCl by volatilization at 573 K.