Recovery of carbon dioxide in nuclear fuel reprocessing cycle

Abstract

Reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel produces off-gas that contains various radioactive components. Carbon-14 with a long half-life, which is mainly released in form of carbon dioxide, will continue to accumulate in environment. The adsorption process could be used for recovery of CO2 from off-gas. In this work, the adsorption of CO2 on synthetic zeolites and natural mordenite was studied in low partial pressure range. Moreover, effect of water vapor on co-adsorption of CO2 was investigated. Adsorption capacity of MS4A for CO2 was found to be almost unaffected by presence of water vapor in contrast to other adsorbents used in this work. This is a great merit and MS4A could be promising candidate for separative recovery of carbon dioxide in nuclear fuel reprocessing cycle.