โ Scribed by F. E. Bowman; D. D. Cubicciotti
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
It is clear that while a metal is in the molten condition additional fissionable material could be added and distributed uniformly through the metal.
Thus pyrometallurgical processing, though in its very early development stages compared with more conventional types, seems to have promise of accomplishing the goals of a processing cycle at potentially less cost. To achieve the final development of such a process will require a prolonged effort on the part of metallurgists, chemical engineers, and chemists. Effort in this laboratory is continuing with experiments on scaling up and on the development of continuous extractors to operate at this temperature.
The results with the artificial fissium mixtures are not very satisfying owing to the lack of agreement in the results.
Unless some improvements are made in this agreement, it may be necessary to go back to real fuels of lower burn-up and to extrapolate to the expected burnup or to wait until fuels of high burn-up are available and have decayed to a level of radioactivity which will permit laboratory handling. Other techniques of making fissium may be more successful and will also be tried.
Before closing, it would be well to point out that this type of processing is also uniquely adapted to use with a liquid-metal fuel reactor. If the other problems which are peculiar to the use of liquid-metal fuels are solved, it is probable that there will be a strong future for pyrometallurgical processing in the reprobessing cycle of a liquid-metal reactor.
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