The entire nuclear fuel cycle is a chemistry-intensive process, from accessing the raw materials from ore, to enriching and forming the fuels, to the eventual long-term disposition or reprocessing of the spent fuel. This chemistry is vital to forensics, as the chemical history of a sample imbues it with unique signatures that should provide insight beyond the scope of information that standard methods such as morphology and isotopics provide. Uranium oxides can be easily oxidized and tend to react with their surroundings over time, which necessitates the assessment of what new chemical signatures are introduced by the aging of a sample. To accomplish this, the analysis of a series of both high-purity standards and commercially prepared samples aged under conditions controlled for temperature and humidity has been undertaken. We have used complementary chemical (XANES, XRD, etc.) and morphological (SEM) characterization techniques to help provide a more robust catalogue of the signatures contained within the aged oxide samples. LA-UR-13-21856

Chemical forensics of aged uranium oxides

246th National Meeting (2013)

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