Nuclear Material Recovery at Los Alamos National Laboratory Using TechXtract{reg_sign} Decontamination Technology

One mission of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is to affect pollution prevention and waste minimization surrounding operations at their Plutonium Facility. Efforts are underway and technologies are being deployed to capture the actinide at the source thereby reducing the amount of nuclear material leaving the facility as transuranic waste. Traditional processing alternatives for decontamination, such as strong acid leaching and surface brushing have not achieved the desired recovery efficiencies for plastic or non-actinide metal matrices. Much of the nuclear material present is fixed in the matrix, and is not susceptible to recovery with surface cleaning techniques. In addition, the relatively large secondary waste volumes associated with the acid leaching have persuaded LANL to evaluate alternative recovery methods. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and testing of a prototype chemical decontamination and co-precipitation process installed at the Los Al amos Plutonium Facility that is based on the patented TechXtract{reg_sign} system developed by Active Environmental Technologies Inc. (AET). The technology was enhanced under a PRDA contract awarded by DOE in 1997.