The Electrochemical Treatment of Nuclear Wastes

Nuclear wastes and especially Legacy wastes require decontamination as straightforward disposal is not a viable option. Current decontamination techniques involve in general the use of chemical reagents which tend to be expensive and have limited efficiencies in the separation of metals such as Plutonium. Electrochemistry could provide a new path for their decontamination where efficiency, cost, mass, capacity and environmental impact can be optimized. This optimization could be achieved by studying the electrochemical properties of the metals present in the legacy waste such as kinetics and mass transport coefficients to develop a separation treatment for them.