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Neptunium, because of its long half life, is an element of long-term interest to the Yucca Mountain repository. The fate of neptunium under repository settings is unknown. This report provides a review and new interpretation of past tests on commercial spent nuclear fuel and experimental evidence on the fate of neptunium. Tests on commercial spent nuclear fuel preformed previously at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) used a bathtub setup by immersing spent fuel in either deionized water or a groundwater typical of those at Yucca Mountain. The main goal of the tests was to determine the different concentrations of radionuclides in solution with different types of cladding defects. Neptunium was not the focus of these tests, nor were the tests designed to study neptunium. Drip tests performed at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) are unsaturated tests that drip water at different rates on spent fuel. Relatively new tests at ANL examine the corrosion of Np-doped U3O8 in humid air at various temperatures. This review concludes that all tests reported here have analytical problems (i.e., relatively high detection limits for Np) and have been configured such that they limit the ability to interpret the available neptunium data. Past tests on spent nuclearmore » fuel do not unambiguously describe neptunium chemistry as there are multiple mechanisms that may explain the observed behavior in each test. One apparently major shortcoming of most tests is that the extent of fuel reaction was limited by the amount of oxygen present in the system. Further detailed studies under repository-relevant conditions, which include the assumption of a constant 20 percent oxygen atmosphere, are needed to provide the data necessary for the development and validation of models used to predict the long-term fate of neptunium and other radionuclides at Yucca Mountain.« less

Existing Evidence for the Fate of Neptunium in the Yucca Mountain Repository