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Undeclared uranium hitches a ride on cobalt exports from Congo, study says
Philippe (left) and Manzuk quantified the amount of uranium that has been exported from the DRC in cobalt shipments or left behind in the environment. (Photo: Joel Hallberg/UW–Madison)
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Princeton University have published a study in Nature Communications that calls attention to a blind spot in nuclear nonproliferation: The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has exported thousands of metric tons of uranium, and there is no accounting for where it has gone.
In partnership with Lighthouse Reports and the Financial Times, UW–Madison nuclear engineering professor and nuclear security expert Sébastien Philippe and Ryan Manzuk, a geologist and research fellow in Philippe’s group and at Princeton, conducted the study using countrywide mineralization and geochemical data.
Samaneh Rakhshan Pouri, Supathorn Phongikaroon
Nuclear Technology | Volume 197 | Number 3 | March 2017 | Pages 308-319
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2016.1273730
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Cyclic voltammetry is one of the most common electroanalytical methods for determining the thermodynamic and electrochemical behavior of a species in the eutectic molten salt. The diffusion coefficient, apparent standard potential, transfer coefficient, equilibrium potential, and other parameters can be determined through this method. This study focused on a development of an interactive reverseengineering method by analyzing available uranium chloride data sets (1 to 10 wt%) in a LiCl-KCl molten salt at 773 K under different scan rates to help improve and provide robustness in detection analysis. A principle method and a computational code have been developed by using electrochemical fundamentals and coupling various variables, such as the diffusion coefficients, formal potentials, and process time duration. In addition, a graphical user interface (GUI) through the commercial software Matlab was created to provide a controllable environment for different users. Results provide plots of current, potential, and concentration of each species as a function of time under various determined conditions. The GUI also displays the reversible and irreversible peaks, in a very short run time (around 2 min), with an adequately selected time interval of approximately 0.08 s and an ability to calculate the concentration of each species (e.g., U4+ and U3+) at any specified conditions.