Radiation safety

Fishing the radioactivity out of nuclear waste

Cleaning up radioactive waste is difficult and often dangerous, especially when uranium is involved. In order to solve the problem of safely handling nuclear waste, a better understanding of uranium is needed.

The EU-funded UNCLE project, which closed in 2014, focussed on improving the clean up process with a study on how uranium undergoes chemical bonding and the effect this has on reactivity. As a result of this work, UNCLE researchers concluded that uranium nitride and oxo-complexes are essentially the same, the only difference being the swapping of a single nitrogen atom in nitride for an oxygen one in oxo-complexes. Researchers realised that the symmetry of the complexes and oxidation state of the uranium ions, rendered them ideal systems from which to develop quantitative models.

The problem, however, is that moving from qualitative to quantitative approaches requires a large family of molecules. To overcome this barrier, researchers identified a reliable new way to make uranium nitride complexes that allows for the preparation of a large family of molecules.