Zirconium Production in Ukraine: Planning for Development

The report presents the review of Ukrainian raw produce sources which serve as a basis for modern knowledge-intensive production of zirconium, its chemical compounds, high-grade alloys.

The feature of zirconium production is its orientation to fabrication of zirconium and its high-grade alloys for nuclear power engineering, a potential for production of wide range of zirconium chemical compounds intended for different application areas.

High technical level of the technology is based on unique methods and state-of-the-art achievements of science.

Flexible production technology allows regulate a content of impurity and doping elements at all its stages that enable fabricate production with a wide range of chemical/physical and consumptive properties.

Many kinds of high-grade zirconium production are only fabricated in Ukraine among all the countries of the former Soviet Union.

Modern analytical base allows identify all basic impurities spectrum of the nuclear technology-specific elements.

The main problem of the zirconium industry of Ukraine is a lack of integration into worldwide economics because of its closed nature, a lack of stationary markets for high-technology production merchandising, interruption of a process cycle after abruption of inter-enterprise relationships between enterprises of the ex-USSR.

The zirconium industry difficulties is aggravated by a lack of possibility to receive investments both from the Ukrainian banks and from foreign investors that disables recovering the lacking process cycles and increasing a fabrication of export-purpose competitive production.

All this as a whole impedes a having new kinds of knowledge-intensive, high-quality, cheaper production fabricated in Ukraine to an industry of industrialized countries, as well as development of promising technologies of XXI century.

High scientific level of the processes, based on which the zirconium industry is created, provides reliable ecological safety of the production, effective protection of the environment, by that it differs from zirconium production conventional ways in industrialized countries of the world.

The main production kinds are: zirconium alloys with iron, nickel, copper, aluminum, manganese, hafnium, niobium; chemical compounds - oxynitrate, oxychloride, acetate, basic carbonate, tetrafluoride, pure and stabilized oxides; articles on zirconium basis, rod, wire, tube, band.

High grade of the zirconium production, its diversity is capable to meet many areas of industry, to provide competitiveness of new technologies.

A.P. Mukhachev,

Director of the State Scientific-Production Enterprise Zirconium

The State Prize Laureate <Signature>

Hafnium is a sufficiently disseminated element which does not have own minerals and exists only in accompanying forms of zirconium minerals.

Its production amounts are determined by the zirconium material processing capacities.

The industrial production of nuclear-grade metallic hafnium with the total content of zirconium and hafnium 99.9 % at the content of zirconium less than 1 (Translator’s note: the original figure is not recognized due to unacceptable quality of the original text) %.

Applying hafnium as a form of alloy with nickel enables improve (Translator’s note: one line has not been translated due to unacceptable quality of the original text) for the critical purpose, such as blades of turbine installations, aircrafts.