Abstract
Separation process is an integral portion of the missions of three offices within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Environmental Management (EM), Office of Nuclear Energy (NE), and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The specific needs of these three offices vary widely, as do their operating timelines. Multiple responsibilities are required to recover nuclear materials for their direct use, future reuse or disposition: cleanup of legacy defense-related nuclear facilities, research on advanced commercial fuel cycles, and treatment and disposal of radioactive wastes including spent nuclear fuel. The scales at which separations are applied also vary significantly, from analytical separations at the microliter scale required for some NNSA applications, to hundreds of metric tons per year recycling of commercial fuel ultimately required by DOE-NE, to the 3.4 × 10^5 m^3 of radioactive wastes stored in tanks at the Hanford site and Savannah River Site (SRS) that DOE-EM must process and immobilize. Similarly, the concentrations involved range from ultra-trace level detection of radionuclides to hundreds of grams per liter, and the complexity of the solution matrices can vary from simple dilute solutions (groundwater) to highly concentrated electrolyte mixtures (salts, acids, bases, complexants, and elements across the periodic table). Despite this disparity, common themes exist that tie together the missions of DOE-EM, DOE-NE, and NNSA. Over the past three years, efforts have been ongoing in DOE to coordinate planning for research, development and deployment (RD&D) of nuclear separations technologies. It has been recognized that nuclear material recovery is a topic in which DOE has an important leadership role. Based on that recognition, DOE organized three workshops and brought together subject matter experts from national laboratories, academia, industry, the international community, and government organizations to discuss the role of nuclear separations, technical subjects (chemistry and speciation, design of molecules, scale-up of processes, and interface issues), opportunities for partnerships among the attending organizations, and the advantages that might obtain to the development of a nuclear separations center of knowledge. The extensive record of the workshops has been summarized in a consolidated report which will be issued in November 2014. Each workshop established a current state of knowledge or technology and evaluated the needs to reach near-term (0 to 5 years), mid-term (6 to 15 years), and long-term (> 15 years) objectives. Details and examples of these findings will be presented in our contribution.
