Yellowcake

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This article is about the chemical urania. For the type of cake, see cake. For the falsified documents, see Yellowcake forgery.

Yellowcake
Other names[hide] urania
Identifiers
CAS number	53125-22-7
Properties
Molecular formula	variable, see text
Appearance	Brown or black granules
Density	9.055 g/cm3, solid
Melting point	2878 °C
Boiling point	4018 Kelvin

Yellowcake (also called urania) is a kind of uranium concentrate powder obtained from leach solutions, in an intermediate step in the processing of uranium ores.^[1] Yellowcake concentrates are prepared by various extraction and refining methods, depending on the types of ores. Typically, yellowcakes are obtained through the milling and chemical processing of uranium ore forming a coarse powder which has a pungent odor, is insoluble in water and contains about 80% uranium oxide, which melts at approximately 2878 °C. Although uranium is one of the densest metals on Earth, yellowcake is relatively light, with a density approximately that of elemental sulfur.

[edit] Overview

The ore is first crushed to a fine powder by passing raw uranium ore through crushers and grinders to produce "pulped" ore. This is further processed with concentrated acid, alkaline, or peroxide solutions to leach out the uranium. Yellowcake is what remains after drying and filtering. The yellowcake produced by most modern mills is actually brown or black, not yellow; the name comes from the color and texture of the concentrates produced by early mining operations.
Initially, the compounds formed in yellowcakes were not identified; in 1970, the U.S. Bureau of Mines still referred to yellowcakes as the final precipitate formed in the milling process and considered it to be ammonium diuranate or sodium diuranate. The compositions were variable and depended upon the leachant and subsequent precipitating conditions. Among the compounds identified in yellowcakes include: uranyl hydroxide, uranyl sulfate, sodium para-uranate, and uranyl peroxide, along with various uranium oxides. Modern yellowcake typically contains 70 to 90 percent triuranium octoxide (U₃O₈) by weight. Other oxides such as uranium dioxide (UO₂) and uranium trioxide (UO₃) exist.^[2]

A drum of yellowcake

Yellowcake is used in the preparation of uranium fuel for nuclear reactors, for which it is smelted into purified UO₂ for use in fuel rods for pressurized heavy-water reactors and other systems that use natural unenriched uranium.
Purified uranium metal (not the uranium oxide) can also be enriched in the isotope U-235. In this process, the uranium is combined with fluorine to form uranium hexafluoride gas (UF₆). Next, that undergoes isotope separation through the process of gaseous diffusion, or in a gas centrifuge. This can produce low-enriched uranium containing up to 20 percent U-235 that is suitable for use in most large      civilian electric-power reactors (some nuclear power reactor designs such as CANDU heavy water reactors use natural uranium oxides with <1% U-235 as fuel). With further processing one obtains highly enriched uranium, containing 20% or more U-235, that is suitable for use in compact nuclear reactors—usually used to power naval warships and submarines. Further processing can yield weapons-grade uranium with U-235 levels usually above 90%, suitable for nuclear weapons. However, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is a worldwide surplus of highly-enriched uranium, and Russian HEU is diluted to LEU for power reactors.
Yellowcake is produced by all countries in which uranium ore is mined.