ABSTRACT. Technetium-99 is an abundant, long-lived ( 1/2 = 213,000 yr) fission product that creates challenges for the safe, long-term disposal of nuclear waste. While 99 Tc receives attention largely due to its high environmental mobility, it also causes problems during its incorporation into nuclear waste glass due to the volatility of Tc(VII) compounds. This volatility decreases the amount of 99 Tc stabilized in the waste glass and causes contamination of the waste glass melter and off-gas system. The approach to decrease the volatility of 99 Tc that has received the most attention is reduction of the volatile Tc(VII) species to less volatile Tc(IV) species in the glass melt. On engineering scale experiments, rhenium is often used as a non-radioactive surrogate for 99Tc to avoid the radioactive contamination problems caused by volatile 99 Tc compounds.However, Re(VII) is more stable towards reduction than Tc(VII), so more reducing conditions would be required in the glass melt to produce Re(IV). To better understand the redox behavior of Tc and Re in nuclear waste glass, a series of glasses were prepared under different redox conditions. The speciation of Tc and Re in the resulting glasses was determined by X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy. Surprisingly, Re and Tc do not behave similarly in the glass melt. Although Tc(0), Tc(IV), and Tc(VII) were observed in these samples, only Re(0) and Re(VII) were found. In no case was Re(IV) (or Re(VI)) observed.
Understanding the origin and dynamics of hadron structure and in turn that of atomic nuclei is a central goal of nuclear physics. This challenge entails the questions of how does the roughly 1 GeV mass-scale that characterizes atomic nuclei appear; why does it have the observed value; and, enigmatically, why are the composite Nambu-Goldstone (NG) bosons in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) abnormally light in comparison? In this perspective, we provide an analysis of the mass budget of the pion and proton in QCD; discuss the special role of the kaon, which lies near the boundary between dominance of strong and Higgs mass-generation mechanisms; and explain the need for a coherent effort in QCD phenomenology and continuum calculations, in exa-scale computing as provided by lattice QCD, and in experiments to make progress in understanding the origins of hadron masses and the distribution of that mass within them. We compare the unique capabilities foreseen at the electron-ion collider (EIC) with those at the hadron-electron ring accelerator (HERA), the arXiv:1907.08218v2 [nucl-ex] Rikutaro Yoshida (ryoshida@jlab.org) INTRODUCTIONAtomic nuclei lie at the core of everything we can see; and at the first level of approximation, their atomic weights are simply the sum of the masses of all the neutrons and protons (nucleons) they contain. Each nucleon has a mass m N ∼ 1 GeV, i.e. approximately 2000-times the electron mass. The Higgs boson produces the latter, but what produces the masses of the neutron and proton? This is the crux: the vast majority of the mass of a nucleon is lodged with the energy needed to hold quarks together inside it; and that is supposed to be explained by QCD, the strong-interaction piece within the Standard Model.QCD is unique. It is a fundamental theory with the capacity to sustain massless elementary degrees-of-freedom, viz. gluons and quarks; yet gluons and quarks are predicted to acquire mass dynamically [1][2][3], and nucleons and almost all other hadrons likewise, so that the only massless systems in QCD are its composite NG bosons [4,5], e.g. pions and kaons. Responsible for binding systems as diverse as atomic nuclei and neutron stars, the energy associated with the gluons and quarks within these Nambu-Goldstone (NG) modes is not readily apparent. This is in sharp and fascinating contrast with all other "everyday" hadronic bound states, viz. systems constituted from up = u, down = d, and/or strange = s quarks, which possess nuclear-size masses far in excess of anything that can directly be tied to the Higgs boson. 1
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