Actinide oxides at the nanoscale are underexplored compared with their lighter-element counterparts. Further investigations are required, however, due to the relevance of nanoscale actinide particles to corrosion in nuclear fuels, their potential as new accident-tolerant fuel materials, and their tendency towards proliferation through environmental systems. Correlating structure/property relationships within these materials requires 1) methods to control size and morphology of actinide oxide nanoparticles with high precision and 2) comprehensive characterization at the atomic and nanometer length scale. Towards this end, approaches to the synthesis and characterization of uranium oxide at the nanoscale will be described. Colloidal-based methods have been used to control both the size and morphology of uranium oxide nanoparticles through varying solvent and molecular ligand chemistry. In particular, anisotropic “nanoflower” particles have been synthesized and the mechanism behind their preferential formation interrogated. Hard-template based approaches using Zr-MOFs have also been pursued and used to control resulting nanoparticle size and surface binding species. Results show that choice of template, precursor and decomposition conditions affect the structure of the resulting nanoscale constructs. Synthesized nanoparticles were characterized using X-ray focused approaches- primarily using X-ray scattering and X-ray spectroscopy. Atomic and nanometer scale structure will be correlated back to synthetic chemistry and provide insight into differences in structural arrangements at the nanoscale in comparison to what is observed in conventional bulk counterparts.

Nanoscale uranium oxide: Correlating synthetic parameters with structure at the atomic and nanometer length scale

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ACS Fall 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.