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Glenn T. Seaborg Center (GTSC) at the Berkeley Laboratory has several
radiochemical laboratories and has a long history of
handling radioactive materials safely. The GTSC members
work with transuranic materials routinely and fully
conform to DOE safety requirements. The safety oversight
is provided by the LBNL EH&S Radiation Protection
Program. The central laboratory facility consists of
three interconnecting laboratories with fume hoods,
controlled atmosphere glove boxes, dedicated radiochemical
gloves boxes, an x-ray powder diffraction camera, and
standard wet chemical laboratory apparatus. The GTSC
nuclear counting room shares internal access to the
main laboratories and has five low noise solid state
Ge γ-spectrometers plus an α-spectrometer.
A scintillation counter is also available.
Surrounding the main radiochemistry laboratories are
specialized, satellite characterization laboratories
designed to accommodate radionuclides. The GTSC laser
facility has a pair of Nd-YAG lasers, an MOPO, dye lasers,
an Ar-ion laser, optical cryostats, several spectrometers,
and a CCD camera. A single crystal and powder diffractometer,
an EPR, UV/VIS/IR spectrometers, and an older 90 MHz
NMR are maintained in small laboratories. The GTSC
synchrotron radiation laboratory has a modest surface
science capability and is used for staging synchrotron
radiation experiments. The GTSC utilizes a multi-processor
Sun SparcStation for computationally intensive relativistic
calculations and Alpha-based DEC machines for data processing.
The GTSC routinely complements the laboratory-based
studies of actinides with synchrotron radiation investigations.
User facilities at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation
Laboratory (SSRL), the Advanced Photon Source (APS),
and the Advanced Light Source (ALS) are used to conduct
synchrotron radiation investigations with radioactive
materials.
The GTSC
has a synchrotron radiation (SR) program at the SSRL
utilizing x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAFS) as a
tool for characterizing radionuclide speciation in a
variety of experimental. The GTSC has developed a state-of-the-art
a multi-element germanium detector with sufficient resolution
at high counting rates to obtain XANES and EXAFS data
on elements of interest at concentrations <10-5
M in solution or <10 ppm in solids. The specialized
experimental equipment necessary to perform XAFS experiments
with radioactive samples has been developed and employed
at SSRL for the investigation of several radionuclide
systems. The experimental procedures concerning the
safety issues of handling radionuclides, including transuranics,
at a DOE SR user facility have been addressed and experiments
have been performed without the requirement of full
time EH&S assistance.
Facilities
at the ALS that will be utilized for our actinide research
program include beamlines for scanning transmission
x-ray microscopy, full-field x-ray microscopy, soft
x-ray spectroscopy and photoemission, infrared spectromicroscopy,
and x-ray fluorescence microspectroscopy. Facilities
under development that will be used include a new x-ray
microtomography beamline, and the ALS Molecular Environmental
Science beamline. We also have several endstation modules
and UHV chambers optimized for environmental research,
and are developing new chambers especially for "wet
spectroscopy" applications.
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