Activities in the Development of the Purex Process.

For nearly 25 years, development efforts were concentrated on the liquid-liquid extraction for reprocessing of spent nuclear fuels. A number of Purex test facilities of laboratory scale as well as pilot plant scale were built offering the possibility to develop the process and its equipment. The major goal throughout the past years was process optimization with respect to a high product yield and high separation efficiency for fission products and simplification of the process and process technology. The work includes light-water reactor fuel as well as fast-breeder reactor fuel reprocessing. The paper gives the results and the actual state of the art.