Minor Actinide Production at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) manages an inventory of materials that contains a range of long-lived radioactive isotopes that were produced from the 1960s through the 1980s by irradiating targets in production reactors to produce special heavy isotopes for DOE programmatic use, scientific research, and industrial and medical applications. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) uses these materials in DOE’s center for production, storage, and distribution of transuranium isotopes (plutonium through californium) for the heavy-element research program and used them as feedstock in the Calutron Electromagnetic Isotope Enrichment Facility, one of only two facilities in the world with capabilities to enrich radioisotopes in multi-gram quantities. As a result, ORNL has extensive experience in the production of transuranium isotopes. This paper reviews the techniques for production of minor actinides, which are the actinide elements in used fuel other than U and Pu (e.g., Np, Am, Cm). This paper will also discuss demonstrated production techniques such as recovery of decay daughters for purified parent isotopes, irradiation with no chemical separation, irradiation with chemical recovery of product, high flux irradiation with chemical recovery of product, and irradiation with short-cooled recovery followed by decay daughter recovery.