All articles tagged with #radioactive materials
A former boy scout, David Charles Hahn, stunned his neighborhood by building a nuclear reactor in his mother's shed in Michigan in 1994. Mistaken for a thief, authorities discovered radioactive materials in the shed and had to conduct a costly clean-up. Although charges were dropped, Hahn later faced legal troubles and struggled with mental health and substance abuse, ultimately passing away in 2016.
Scientists have developed a new approach to harvest detailed chemical information on radioactive and/or enriched stable isotopes, requiring 1,000 times less material than previous state-of-the-art methods. The new method leverages polyoxometalate ligands (POMs), a class of molecules that has so far been largely overlooked for radiochemistry applications. The intrinsic properties of the POMs allow scientists to easily form compounds where the POMs form chemical bonds with the targeted radioisotopes, then crystallize these compounds, then study them with a wide variety of spectroscopic techniques while just using a few micrograms of material, compared to multiple milligrams or more for previous methods.