Technetium-99 (99Tc) is a long-lived fission product of 235U and separating it from nuclear storage tanks, characterizing it and coming up with a long-term storage solution remains a challenge. It is therefore important to understand the speciation, coordination environment and oxidation of 99Tc. Polyoxometalates (POMs) are inorganic metal oxide clusters able to simulate solid oxide materials. They are chemically robust, nontoxic and present diverse elemental compositions with varying redox and electronic properties, thus making them ideal model systems within which to study the behavior of 99Tc. Since POMs can be reduced using sunlight or electrolysis and can shuttle multiple electrons without losing their structural properties they can be used to potentially reduce and complex 99Tc species of high or low valency. This allows for the potential stabilization of the reduced metal in an environment that can both be well controlled and well characterized. In this presentation, we use vanadium-substituted Keggin (PW12) POMs, which present both hard and soft binding sites to explore the binding and redox properties of 99Tc and its non-radioactive analog rhenium.

Exploring the speciation and redox chemistry of technetium-99 using polyoxometalates as highly controlled metal oxide mimics

2019 Spring National Meeting

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