Plutonium decontamination

In an on-going effort to design and synthesize chemical substances that can safely and effectively remove plutonium and other radioactive materials from the human body or from the environment, scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have made an important advance.

Using the exceptionally bright and intense x-ray beams of Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS), they have determined the crystal structure of a molecular complex that has shown promise as a sequestering agent for plutonium and other members of the actinide family of elements.

“This is the first plutonium complex that has been characterized using single crystal x-ray diffraction with a synchrotron radiation source like the ALS,” says Anne Gorden, the Glenn T. Seaborg Center Postdoctoral Fellow with Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division (CSD), and one of the co-authors of a paper on this work which appears in an upcoming issue of Chemistry, a European Journal.