Radioactive element chemistry and processing

Radioactive element chemistry examines how actinides and lanthanides — particularly uranium and its neighbors on the periodic table — behave chemically when they interact with other substances, from mineral surfaces and organic molecules to living microorganisms. Understanding these interactions matters enormously for managing nuclear waste and containing environmental contamination, since the mobility, solubility, and toxicity of these elements depend heavily on the chemical forms they adopt through processes like complexation, adsorption, and bioremediation. Researchers are actively working to design more selective extraction agents that can separate actinides from lanthanides with greater precision, a notoriously difficult separation because the two groups share similar ionic sizes and charge states. There is also growing interest in how microbes can immobilize uranium in contaminated soils and groundwater, and in understanding the coordination chemistry that governs these transformations well enough to make such approaches reliable at scale.

Works

144,955

Total citations

1,793,131

Keywords

ActinidesUraniumLanthanidesExtractionSorptionBioremediation