Chemical processes for recovery and purification of high-purity uranium-234 from aged plutonium-238

This work describes a streamlined approach to the recovery and purification of U-234 from aged Pu-238. Key modifications to conventional techniques are described that result in an efficient uranium and plutonium separation process that successfully produced tens of grams of ultrahigh purity U-234 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. A new processing scheme was developed using an anion exchange column run in a cycling mode with HNO3 media as the primary uranium purification process. This was followed with a uranyl peroxide precipitation step to purify and solidify the uranium before conversion to U3O8. Both the traditional uranyl peroxide precipitation method and a new cascade uranyl peroxide precipitation process were used for final purification of the U-234.