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Panel Discussion

Five views on opportunities and constraints for actinide research

Monday evening's panel discussion brought together five preeminent names in actinide science: Graham Andrew, of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); Theresa Fryberger, head of the DOE's Division of Environment Remediation Science; Gerry Lander of the Institute of Transuranium Elements (ITU) in Karlsrühe, Germany; Senior Los Alamos Fellow and former director Sig Hecker; and Vic Reis of Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC). The discussion was moderated by Los Alamos' Ed Arthur.

Gerry Lander:

There are tremendously exciting prospects for actinide science . . . but there are also some fundamental problems that we, as the actinide people, should address. The first is: how do we as institutes that have special capabilities share those capabilities with people on the outside?

The pressure's on us from the institutional aspect to reduce the number of places, to reduce the flexibility at those places. And at the same time, we have to reach out to other people, because otherwise, this field is going to get smaller and smaller in the funding eye. Somebody, today, made the comment that age profile at this conference is much better . . . much younger. Bringing in students and showing them things can be done is another crucial aspect that we have to be fully aware of.

The other thing that has personally frustrated me is an institutional problem again. Transport of our materials has become an absolute nightmare. In the old days we used to carry around bits of uranium. I never went anywhere without bits of uranium in my suitcase. Now that's absolutely forbidden. And, you know, there are people who think . . . that a milligram of uranium will kill a whole province in France. You can't somehow get across to these people that there's uranium all over the place.

But the transport now, especially post-September 2001, has become more difficult. There's been a total crackdown. And that just means collaboration between the labs is cut again. So there's this huge tendency to reduce things, to cut us off from the outside.

Let me just say a bit about reactor future. And all the countries, in my view, are not collaborating enough. I think there is good commercial reason for that. There is, of course, a lot of money in nuclear fuel . . . and so there is a lack of collaboration, which is driven partly by money. But in the end, if there is not collaboration, we all go down together. I would like to see a more-open forum on discussing the pros and cons of those fuels rather than this sort of internal battling that seems to be going on all the time.

I am enormously distressed by the huge cuts that we are seeing in our neighboring institutions, and the whole atmosphere that we see in many European countries with a working nuclear power system-a constant reduction. It's not just because of the waste legacy, but also because of the whole question of how the third world fits in . . . for power and for raising the standards of living.

Vic Reis:

The future of civilization really depends upon how actinides, and specifically plutonium, are managed over the next fifty years. It's that important; I don't think there's anything more important. I come at this from both the perspective of national security and global climate change. And if you think about the major things that can occur over the next fifty years, how one deals with actinides, plutonium in particular, will be key to much of that.

I worked twenty years ago in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House. I was really impressed with the astronomy community, because what astronomy did then-and I suspect, still does-is that they argue a lot among themselves. But they then present a unified research agenda, and that makes life a lot easier for the people in the Office of Management and Budget and those people in the National Science Foundation who have to put the policy together for Congress.

What I've learned over the past four years since I've left the warm confines of the nuclear weapons complex and moved out in to the broader world is that it's very hard to get a unified research agenda.

I suspect that we have a good many of the entire community right here at this meeting. The good news, right, is that there aren't very many of you. The bad news is that you can't seem to figure out what to do. At least by the time it reaches the Department of Energy and Congress, it's so complicated that the interplay between the politics and the research community frequently gets destroyed. But the research community ought to be able to figure . . out what that agenda is; and if they do that, much of the politics will . . . I won't say take care of itself . . . but it will be a lot easier.

Theresa Fryberger:

If you look at the cleanup efforts of the weapons complex in the United States, a lot of people would say that this has not been as successful as it might have been. And part of the reason is because they don't know where contaminants will go; they don't know how they behave; they cannot predict risk.

If we're hoping to make a place for clean nuclear energy or safe deposition of waste, we need to understand this. We've studied the transport of contaminants for several decades, particularly for Yucca Mountain. And people ask: "Well, why don't we know more?" One reason is that, until about a decade ago, we didn't have the ability to do things like speciation and actual environmental samples that we're now able to focus on. So we really couldn't understand at the molecular level what the real chemistry was. We've made great progress over the last decade, but we need to continue to make more.

So where do I think we need to go in environmental sciences in the near future? Scaling is an issue; we need to get beyond the molecular level. We need to make more progress, both temporal and spatial. We need better characterization techniques in the field . . . and we need to focus science a little bit differently. We need long-term comprehensive field studies that are conducted by teamsÑdedicated teams of scientists from various disciplines. And we need to use modeling, both for designing experiments as well as to model systems.

Sig Hecker:

The near future? It's the f-electrons that are exciting and that's one of the ex's going to be heard a number of times: that plutonium sits right at that knife edge between the very different kind of behavior-bonding or localized . . . you know, participating in the process or being chemically inert. And we still have lots of years of exciting research to try to soak that up.

To me, actinides mean new materials, new behavior, and new thinking. Personally, what's been of greatest interest . . . what's so interesting and fascinating is plutonium's instability. We saw today the enormous gyrations that they find as a function of temperature with all the six allotropes. So it's unstable with temperature but it's also very unstable with pressure. Then with the six allotropes-when you start squeezing on them-those high volume states start to squeeze out, and then, with any actinide, you may end up with interesting results in the crystal structure. But if you get the right chemical additions like gallium and aluminum, you can stabilize nice metallic crystal structures.

Unfortunately, the problems of proliferation and terrorism threaten to set back all our efforts for decades. There's a great need for international collaboration. Meanwhile, there's the Patriot Act . . . supposed to be keeping terrorists out, and is keeping academicians out instead.

Russia is a huge environmental laboratory, and we should be over there taking advantage of things they've done wrong. It illustrates that it's almost impossible, today, to get experimental work done.

Graham Andrew:

What I've been hearing from my colleagues . . . and I agree . . . is that the basic science is driven by both strategic and policy requirements. We must make a decision early on and go from basic science to the next step. Yet we can't pursue all options.

An example of crucial decision-making is the area of waste. Unless we resolve repository and waste-management problems, we won't be proliferating weapons, but rather, Yucca Mountains.

Beyond plutonium, we need to improve our capabilities in minor actinide science. Minor actinide science needs to be taken forward in the next ten years; we need new forensics. Do we have the same understanding of, for example, solution chemistry for the minor actinides as we do for plutonium?

We need much better international cooperation with respect to fuel-cycle options. For example, do we want to proliferate reprocessing plants or coalesce those efforts into, for example, having three or four such facilities around the world?

Most important, we need to be concerned about capturing the knowledge base that already exists . . . dealing with capturing the knowledge of people leaving the field. Else, we risk squandering what is an irreplaceable resource.


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