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NPO graphic - Scientists from The University of Manchester have managed to successfully make a transuranium complex where the central metal, here neptunium, forms a multiple bond to just one other element. Enabling study of such a bonding interaction in isolation for the first time is a key breakthrough for nuclear waste clean-up. Reported in the journal, Nature Chemistry , a group of researchers from The University Manchester, the European Commission Joint Research Centre Karlsruhe, and Los Alamos National Laboratory successfully prepared and characterised this long-sought transuranium chemical bonding scenario in an isolable compound. The study of metal-element multiple bond interactions is an enormous area of research in chemistry with decades of intensive investigations that have sought to understand chemical bonding, reactivity, catalysis, and separations applications. Where actinide-element multiple bonding is concerned, there is much interest in exploiting understanding of chemical bonding (covalency) in extraction studies, because this could inform attempts to separate and clean up nuclear waste. However, whilst metal-element multiple bond investigations are routinely reported and well established across the Periodic Table right up to uranium, the heaviest element to occur naturally in significant quantities, investigations involving transuranium elements, which are elements that come after uranium in the Periodic Table such as neptunium, have been restricted due to the need to conduct work on such radioactive elements in specialist facilities.
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