Recovery of Rare Actinides from Oak Ridge National Laboratory Legacy Nuclear Materials

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) manages an inventory of materials that contains a range of actinide isotopes that were produced from the 1960s through the 1980s by irradiating targets in production reactors to produce 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 heavy isotopes (uranium 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. Both the production reactors and enrichment facilities have been shut down, and many of these unique materials will never be produced again. As a result, ORNL has an inventory of rare actinide isotopes that are being held for reuse because they have potential intrinsic value to DOE, but many of these materials have no currently defined use. This inventory is being reviewed, and efforts are underway to identify programmatic users. Steps are being taken to recover the useful materials, repackage them, and stage them for distribution to programmatic users. If no programmatic need for the materials can be found, the materials are being processed for waste disposal. This paper describes the approach that ORNL has taken to determine whether the inventory of materials should be kept or wasted and the activities that are being initiated to recover the materials.