Improvement of Ruthenium Decontamination in Uranium Purification Cycle With Acetohydroxamic Acid

In order to improve the decontamination of ruthenium in nuclear fuel reprocessing, the pretreatment of the feed solution with acetohydroxamic acid （AHA）has been investigated in this paper. The influences of AHA concentration, pretreatment temperature and time on decontamination of ruthenium have been studied. Single stage extraction experiments were carried out with 0.2 mol/L HNO₃ system by pretreatment of 3 h at 80 ℃. In this way, 0.2 mol/L AHA can make the distribution coefficient of ruthenium(D(Ru)) with 30%TBP/kerosene HNO₃ system decrease by a factor of 3. And the cascade experiments for 2D tank in uranium purification cycle show that the value of DF(Ru)(about 1.82×10³) has increased by 6 times compared with that of the experiments without the application of AHA.