The development of centrifugal contactors: Next generation solvent extraction equipment for advanced reprocessing of nuclear fuels

The technology gaps in our understanding of annular centrifugal contactors (ACCs) for the next generation of spent nuclear fuel recycling are being investigated in a modern setting. This article reports on the unique-in-the-UK capabilities that the University of Leeds’s Nuclear Engineering Group has established, as a partner of the AFCP, for testing and developing ACCs from laboratory to engineering scales and state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models.