Manufacture of fully dense uranium nitride pellets using hydride derived powders with spark plasma sintering

Applying a combination of hydriding/nitriding of metallic uranium with the spark plasma sintering technique, we show that uranium nitride pellets with an average porosity of 0.2% may be manufactured. This is considerably smaller than the lowest porosity previously reported in the literature. The high density is attained by sintering at 1650 °C for only three minutes.