Description of strontium precipitation in highly concentrated nitric acid

Abstract

The precipitation of strontium in highly concentrated nitric acid is often used in standard radiochemical methods for 90Sr separation. In this work, the description of Sr behavior in such conditions was studied in the point of speciation simulation. Standard speciation method based on Phreeqc software was considered but two problems underlined the limits of this approach to study this process: inappropriate ionic strength correction model (for I > 10 M) and the particular dissociation of nitric acid. To overcome these issues, a multipurpose-fitting routine, Minuit, was used to fit chemical model parameters. A polynomial expression was also added to the model in order to take into account nitric acid dissociation. This alternative was proved successful to calculate the Sr precipitate in highly concentrated nitric acid. Comparison was made with the results obtained with Design of Experiment methodology.