Novel Functionalized Ceramic Getter Materials for Adsorption of Radioiodine.

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ABSTRACTA new class of getter materials has been synthesized for immobilization of long-lived radionuclides such as129I. These novel materials consist of nanoporous ceramic substrates with tailored pore sizes ranging from 2 – 20 nm. These high surface area (∼1000 m2/g) ceramic substrates have been functionalized with self-assembled monolayers consisting of soft cation-capped thiol-functionality. The resulting getter materials exhibit highly dense binding sites, and excellent selectivity for iodide. The effectiveness of these novel getter materials was evaluated using radioiodide-spiked samples of surface water and concrete leachate and adsorption performance was compared with natural sulfide mineral getter materials. The data indicated that the novel getter materials have very high affinity for radioiodide (Kd: 4 × 104– 3 × 105ml/g and 6 × 105ml/g in surface and concrete leachate respectively). Comparatively, the radioiodide Kdvalues for natural mineral getters were typically two to three orders magnitude less than the novel getters. The results indicated that the synthetic getter materials have the potential to immobilize and therefore retard the migration of129I in the subsurface environment. Additional studies are being conducted to evaluate thelong-term stability of these materials in waste disposal environments.