Nuclear Energy and Nuclear Forensics Focus of Research at WSU

In 2006, President George W. Bush created the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership with the goal to build an international coalition for recycling used nuclear fuel in a way that reuses key components but sequesters the plutonium isotopes that could be used for nuclear weapons.

As part of that initiative last fall, Washington State University chemistry professors Sue Clark, Kenneth Nash and Pat Meier received a $3 million DOE Nuclear Energy Research Initiative grant to investigate methods for reprocessing used nuclear fuel.

The team is studying the process of separating used fuel byproducts from the energy-producing uranium. The byproducts are then “transmuted” by irradiation into shorter-lived isotopes.

Developing separations to recycle uranium could provide a timely solution for radioactive waste disposal. But Clark cautions, “There are still many years of research and development that need to be done before the U.S. as a nation can use the transmutation technology.”

Clark, a chemistry professor, interim vice-chancellor for academic affairs at WSU Tri-Cities and an internationally recognized environmental radiochemist, also works in the field of nuclear forensics.

Using laboratories and the Nuclear Radiation Center at WSU Pullman, and through collaborations with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the Tri-Cities, her team develops analytical procedures necessary to monitor environmental evidence of nuclear activities.

Clark devises techniques for measuring uranium and other radioactive elements in soil and water. Her methods help monitor global nuclear activity and also can trace isotopes from ancient, naturally occurring “fission reactors” formed many millennia ago.

Clark can be reached at 509-335-1411 or s_clark@wsu.edu. For more information about her research, visit https://www.chem.wsu
.edu/people/faculty/s_clark.html.