Liz Keegan

Postgraduate Student

 

Contact Details

ANSTO, Building 64
Phone: +61-2-9717-3472
Fax: +61-2-9717-7758
Email: eak@ansto.gov.au

Supervisors: Lou Vance and Simon Turner

Liz

 

Research Project

Liz Keegan currently works at ANSTO and is undertaking a part-time PhD with the Department of Earth and Planetary Science. The aim of her project is to establish the capability to measure protactinium-231 (231Pa) in a range of sample types for a range of different applications.

 231Pa has a half-life of 32760 years and is the longest lived intermediate daughter of 235U in the naturally occurring 235U radioactive decay chain.231Pa measurements can be used in U-series disequilibria dating which can be applied to fields such as oceanography, paleoclimatology and volcanology. Some particular samples to be investigated are oceanic basalts from the Manus Basin and the East Pacific Rise that have been previously analysed for238U-2300Th- 226Ra. Pa analysis will allow confirmation of the results obtained using these radionuclides.

ANSTO’s main interest in 231Pa measurements is for nuclear forensic applications. Protactinium analysis can be used as an ‘age determination’ tool (i.e. time elapsed since production or last purification) for nuclear materials. Protactinium analysis can also be applied to research into neutron induced reactions on major and minor actinides for the so-called next generation nuclear power plants (Gen-III and Gen-IV reactors).

Measurement of 231Pa (and 234U, 230Th, 235U) involves dissolution of the sample, chemical separation of individual isotopes using column chromatography and measurement using multi-collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (MC-ICPMS) or accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS).e time in weathering profiles measured using uranium-series isotope disequilibria  Oral presentation at Australian Earth Science Convention 2010 at Canberra, Australia.

P. O. Suresh, N. Verma, D. Dhingra, N. Srivastava and N. Bhandari (2004) Alpha and gamma spectrometry from a Lunar Polar Orbiter for study of volatile transport on the moon. Poster presentation at National Space Science Symposium, Kottayam, India.

 

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