Plutonium segregation in glassy aerodynamic fallout from a nuclear weapon test

K S Holliday; J M Dierken; M L Monroe; M A Fitzgerald; N E Marks; R C Gostic; K B Knight; K R Czerwinski; I D Hutcheon; J W McClory

doi:10.1039/c6dt04184a

Plutonium segregation in glassy aerodynamic fallout from a nuclear weapon test

Dalton Trans. 2017 Feb 14;46(6):1770-1778. doi: 10.1039/c6dt04184a.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 7000 East Avenue, Livermore, CA, USA 94550. holliday7@llnl.gov.
² Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, OH, USA 45433.
³ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 7000 East Avenue, Livermore, CA, USA 94550. holliday7@llnl.gov and University of Nevada Las Vegas, 4505 Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas, NV, USA 89154.
⁴ University of Nevada Las Vegas, 4505 Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas, NV, USA 89154.

PMID: 28074207
DOI: 10.1039/c6dt04184a

Abstract

This study combines electron microscopy equipped with energy dispersive spectroscopy to probe major element composition and autoradiography to map plutonium in order to examine the spatial relationships between plutonium and fallout composition in aerodynamic glassy fallout from a nuclear weapon test. A sample set of 48 individual fallout specimens were interrogated to reveal that the significant chemical heterogeneity of this sample set could be described compositionally with a relatively small number of compositional endmembers. Furthermore, high concentrations of plutonium were never associated with several endmember compositions and concentrated with the so-called mafic glass endmember. This result suggests that it is the physical characteristics of the compositional endmembers and not the chemical characteristics of the individual component elements that govern the un-burnt plutonium distribution with respect to major element composition in fallout.