Coordination Chemistry of Actinide Nitrates with Cyclic Amide Derivatives for the Development of the Nuclear Fuel Materials Selective Precipitation (NUMAP) Reprocessing Method

Nuclear fuel recycling is one of promising options to resolve current issues arising from energy security and nuclear wastes. Chemical separation called reprocessing aims to recover recyclable nuclear fuel materials from spent fuels, and also to reduce the volume of high‐level radioactive wastes. Even today, solvent extraction is extensively employed as a principal method for reprocessing, while there are also several safety and security concerns arising from use of large amount of organic solvents and potential isolation of highly purified (namely “decontaminated”) Pu. To resolve these issues, we propose selective precipitation of nuclear fuel materials as an alternative principle for the spent fuel reprocessing. In this minireview, we outlined history of our development of precipitation‐based reprocessing methods for spent nuclear fuels from serendipitous discovery of N‐cyclohexyl‐2‐pyrrolidone to current status reaching our simple and versatile reprocessing concept, NUclear fuel MAterials selective Precipitation (NUMAP).