INTRODUCTION The current practice of internal dosimetry for occupational workers handling actinides, in particular Pu/Am, involves monitoring of intakes. This, in turn, requires assessments of internal actinide contamination of the relevant body organs. Such assessments are needed: a) more often and almost on a routine basis for lungs for the recent as well as old exposures; b) comparatively le...

Half of the heavy elements including all actinides are produced in r-process nucleosynthesis, whose sites and history remain a mystery. If continuously produced, the Interstellar Medium is expected to build-up a quasi-steady state of abundances of short-lived nuclides (with half-lives ≤100 My), including actinides produced in r-process nucleosynthesis. Their existence in today's interstellar me...

The contamination of Japan after the Fukushima accident has been investigated mainly for volatile fission products, but only sparsely for actinides such as plutonium. Only small releases of actinides were estimated in Fukushima. Plutonium is still omnipresent in the environment from previous atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. We investigated soil and plants sampled at different hot spots in Jap...

Abstract Although the multimessenger detection of neutron star merger event GW170817 confirmed that mergers are promising sites producing majority nature’s heavy elements via rapid neutron-capture process ( r -process), a number issues related to production translead nuclei—the actinides—remain be answered. In this short review paper, we summarize general requirements for actinide in -process a...

Bis-triazinyl-pyridines (BTPs) have been developed at CEA-Marcoule to separate actinides(III) from lanthanides(III). Although high separation performances were observed in the counter-current hot test carried out in 1999 on a highly active effluent, the extraction and back-extraction yields of actinides(III) were lower than expected from calculation. A strong sensitivity of the extractant towar...

Partitioning and transmutation (P&T) aims at making nuclear energy more sustainable from the viewpoint of the back-end of the fuel cycle by minimising the high-level waste with respect to its mass, radiotoxicity and (possibly) repository risk. P&T mainly deals with the management – i.e. transmutation and/or special conditioning and confinement – of minor actinides and fission products, but invo...

Siderophores are microbial produced low molecular weight iron chelators and strongly bind to hard Lewis acids. The siderophore desferrioxamine B (DFO) has hydroxamate functional groups, similar to acetohydroxamic acid (AHA), a ligand that is proposed for actinide complexation in advanced separations. In the proposed separation involving AHA, the exact role of the complex in the extraction behav...

An overview is given of the current state of the art for the determination of radionuclide traces in the environment and the separation of fission products and actinides in nuclear samples by techniques like flow-injection (FI)/sequential injection analysis (SIA) and chromatography hyphenated to inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS).