Award Date

1-1-2005

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Chemistry

First Committee Member

Spencer Steinberg

Number of Pages

80

Abstract

Since the start of the nuclear age, weapons testing and commercial nuclear power plants have been producing radioactive iodine-129 as a fission by-product. Iodine-131 has a half-life of 8 days and is generally not deemed a serious storage problem. Iodine-129 has a half-life of sixteen million years and decays by Beta emission; The Department of Energy (DOE) has determined there are three major contributors to public radiation dose as a consequence of radionuclides releases. The three isotopes of major concern for the DOE are iodine-129, technetium-99 and neptunium-237 (129I, 99Tc, 237Np). DOE has a research and development program called the "National Department of Energy Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative" to recover and transmute iodine-129 to a stable isotope of xenon (130Xe) in which UNLV program is the "Transmutation Reprocessing Program" (TRP); This research explores the use of hitherto unexplored materials to trap iodine from nuclear fuel reprocessing, by either using Natural Organic Matter (NOM) or Fullerene Carbon Compounds (FCCs) for immobilization or conversion to a suitable target for nuclear transmutation.

Keywords

Carbon; Compounds; Containing; Fission; Fullerene; Immobilization; Insoluble; Iodine; Matter; Natural; Organic; Reaction

Controlled Subject

Chemistry, Analytic; Nuclear chemistry; Chemistry, Inorganic

File Format

pdf

File Size

1863.68 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Permissions

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this dissertation or thesis and wish to have the full text removed from Digital Scholarship@UNLV, please submit a request to digitalscholarship@unlv.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Download


Share

COinS