Irradiation and isolation of fission products from uranium metal–organic frameworks

Typical fission product formation experiments utilize metal or oxide target materials that must be dissolved prior to product separation. We report here a novel study using metal–organic frameworks for recovery of fission products into acidic media. We further show that the frameworks are largely preserved, such that this bulk target material could be retained for additional irradiations or characterizations. Through this approach, fission products can be separated from the actinide-based metal–organic framework using 0.01 M HNO3 without the need to dissolve the framework itself, reducing the amount of acidic waste. Extraction yields of four frameworks with varying pore sizes are compared. The results suggest that it may be possible to use porous frameworks as target materials for the extraction of select fission products.