ACS Day1: New Actinide Solvent Extractors
by mitch on Aug 17 2008 (3521 Views)The ability to selectively extract actinides out of nuclear waste remains a hot research topic. Today Hancock, from Wilmington, gave a presentation on several tetradentate ligands that bind to actinides more strongly than other smaller metals. The systems he investigated are shown below.
The PDA system was highlighted for its rigidity, fluorescent potential, and the size of its cavity. Some formation data below.
These types of systems look promising and are a nice upgrade over traditional old-school extractors like tributylphosphate(TBP).
Much of the talk was covered in this recent paper: Affinity of the Highly Preorganized Ligand PDA...
Update 1: A Chemical Sabbatical linked here: Hooray! Aqueous Transition Metal Chemistry Talks
Mitch
Looks like a nice system, but their explanation for the difference in binding between Gd/Th seems a bit shaky to me.