74. 



the Detroit Edison Company is interested in the fast breeder reactor 

 using alloys containing only a small amount of fissionable material; 

 in order to run the system at the maximum efficiency, that is, to 

 breed, the fuel is to be purified at a high rate. The problem is not 

 just to rid the fuel of the fission products, but also to process rapidly 

 so as to minimize the inventory costs of fissionable uranium. It takes 

 a lot of reactors to make it economical to run a chemical processing 

 plant; but on the other hand, all of the different reactor plants must 

 have some on-the-site purification in order to cut down the amount of 

 idle uranium. Then the slags or the concentrated form of the fission 

 products containing a minimum of uranium will be shipped to a central 

 facility where it is economic to recover the remaining uranium. 



The only reason we have the waste is because we are treating 

 the fission products to recover the U 235 or the U 233 or the Plutonium 

 239. If none of these materials were in the fission products then there 

 would be no interest in them at the present time. However, we are 

 interested in the radioisotopes because they are potentially valuable 

 raw materials. Throughout our corporation we are encouraging re- 

 search in applications as a form of investigation distinct from research 

 in separation and recovery. We want to encourage research in applica- 

 tions to such fields as alloys, gases, carbons, chemicals, plastics, 

 and resins, and we are trying to build up within our corporation an ap- 

 preciation of the need for the utilization of these materials, so that 

 instead of a waste disposal problem we are converting it into a raw ma- 

 terial problem. We are, therefore, in favor of disposal in such a way 

 that the material is not lost but is retained somewhere so that in the 

 next five or ten years it can be recovered and put to use; that is -what 

 I would like to suggest at the present time. We have given a lot of 

 thought to the methods developed at Brookhaven and other laboratories 

 where the materials are treated in not-too-dilute form so that the val- 

 uable components can be put to some future use. 



DR. CLAUS: To what extent may we actually consider it feasible 

 to remove strontium and cesium? I think this was discussed very en- 

 thusiastically yesterday as something that might be done easily, and 

 yet I understand that we have not yet reached the stage where it can be 

 extracted from waste streams in a reasonable useable manner. It 

 makes a difference what kind of disposal can be applied to the remain- 

 ing material. If these elements are not present, the degree of hazard 

 is so much less, that you have a different way of thinking about the re- 

 maining wastes than if the cesium and strontium are present. I think 

 this ought to be clarified before we think seriously about what to do 

 with the remaining material. 





