Abstract
The sustainable management of radioactive waste is one of the main challenges that the nuclear industry has to face. The separation and recycling of the highest decay heat emitters could ease the treatment and reduce the volume of high level radioactive waste to be stored in the future deep geological repository. After the removal of U and Pu by the PUREX or similar process, the main heat emitters are minor actinides (mainly 241Am) and some fission products (mainly 137Cs and 90Sr). Several separation processes have been designed to treat part of these elements (DIAMEX-SANEX, TALSPEAK, FPEX, SREX…) or all of them either by successive steps (e.g. ARTIST) or by co-extraction (e.g. UNEX, CRAMEX) to decrease the number of steps. However, these latter processes use non-incinerable solvents, hence forming secondary liquid waste to be treated. Instead, we proposed the CHON UNEX [1], whose organic phase consists in a calixarene crown-ether solubilized by a diglycolamide in a mixture of kerosene and 1-octanol (phase modifier to prevent the 3rd phase formation).