Actinide Chemistry - From Small Molecules To Real Rock

Actinide chemistry is of utmost importance for chemical engineering and environmental science related to the nuclear industry or nuclear waste repositories. Yet, their chemistry remains underexplored relative to other elements in the periodic table. This is equally true for fundamental studies regarding complexation chemistry or redox properties and applied investigations of geochemical behavior and environmental transport.
In this presentation, I will give an overview of recent (and not so recent) studies attempting to link the actinides’ fundamental properties with their environmental transport. Systematic studies of their coordination chemistry offer a promising route to obtain fundamental knowledge about chemical bonding in actinide compounds. Here, a suitable approach is to study series of isostructural actinide compounds, in which the metal is present in the same oxidation state. Changes in structures, bond distances, or spectroscopic properties can then be related to changes in f-orbital occupation. One important issue in this context is the degree of covalency in these compounds and how it depends on the donor atoms of a ligand, or the electronic structure and oxidation state of the actinide.
It is this chemical behavior, which then affects how mobile actinides can be if they are released into the environment as a consequence of nuclear accidents, other accidental releases or in the context of nuclear waste disposal. In these scenarios, special attention must be paid to processes occurring at the water/mineral interface. Here, we will discuss how a combination of spectroscopy, microscopy, and surface X-ray diffraction can be used to both, obtain molecular level information from the interfacial region and also relate this molecular processes to retention behavior in macroscopic, close-to-realistic systems, such as natural crystalline rock.