An international team of scientists, led by the Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), have found a new compound of plutonium with an unexpected, pentavalent oxidation state.
This new phase of plutonium is solid and stable, and may be a transient phase in radioactive waste repositories. The results are published this week in Angewandte Chemie as a Very Important Paper (VIP). Countries across the globe are making efforts to improve the safety of the nuclear waste storage in order to prevent release of radioactive nuclides to the environment. Plutonium, has been shown to be transported by groundwaters from contaminated sites for kilometres in the form of colloids, which are formed by interaction with clay, iron oxides or natural organic matter.
A team of scientists lead by HZDR studies the chemistry of actinides under environmentally relevant conditions, by synthesizing such compounds, and then studying their electronic and structural behaviour both with advanced synchrotron X-ray methods experimentally as well as theoretically. The latest paper of the international team shows how an experiment seemingly gone wrong leads to a breakthrough: the discovery of a new stable form of plutonium.
It all started when Kristina Kvashnina, physicist from HZDR and based at the ROBL beamline at the ESRF, and her team were trying to create plutonium dioxide nanoparticles using different precursors to be studied at ROBL. When they used the Pu (VI) precursor, they realized that a strange reaction took place during the formation of the plutonium dioxide nanoparticles. “Every time we create nanoparticles from the other precursors Pu(III), (IV) or (V) the reaction is very quick, but here we observed a weird phenomenon half way”, explains Kvashnina. She figured that it must be Pu (V), pentavalent plutonium, a never-observed-before form of the element, after doing a high-energy resolution fluorescence detection (HERFD) experiment at the Pu L3 edge at ROBL.
>Read more about the research at ROBL on the ESRF website
Image: The team in front of the spectrometer of ROBL. Kristina Kvashnina is the second from the right.