Claire's Project Page

Who:  I’m from Salt Lake City, Utah, and chose to study at the U for the ACCESS program and opportunities to engage in meaningful research as part of my undergraduate career. I enjoy downhill biking, baking cookies, and learning about the world around me through physical exploration and reading National Geographic.

My scientific/engineering interests:  I love the way knowledge unfolds when I study and practice science and engineering. Electricity is mind-boggling, and has changed the way we live. Math and chemistry taught me that the universe obeys laws, and if we’re clever, we can discover them. There are always new things to understand and develop.

Academic goals:  I’m pursuing a degree in electrical engineering, and considering a minor in mathematics, materials science, or chemistry.  I hope to continue working in my ACCESS lab and would like to attend conferences and present research sometime in the future. After completing my bachelor’s degree I intend to get a job, whether that be in research or industry.

Career goals:  Reliable access to electricity improves the quality of life for people around the world. I’m interested in working with semiconductors, different forms of energy storage, and nuclear power. I want to help ensure a positive future and be involved in the development and implementation of electricity management technologies that make our communities more fair, sustainable, and efficient. 

For the refinement of nuclear materials, it has become increasingly important to have the ability to separate metal impurities from actinides. This separation enables recovery and recycling of valuable rare earth metals and actinides, as well as granting greater control over the radioactive half life and volume of eventual high level waste. Potential applications of refinement of these materials include recycling of nuclear waste, refinement of nuclear fuels for use in civil energy production, and purifying nuclear weapons materials. A process has been proposed that uses steps of hydriding, chlorination, and volatilization to separate various impurities from the product. Experiments with cerium as the target metal to be purified have been performed with additions of uranium, aluminum, iron, tantalum, and gallium. During these experiments complete conversion to chlorides could not be achieved without using ultra-high purity chlorine gas as the reactant and taking the temperature to 923 K. One viable explanation for incomplete chlorination was that oxygen molecules might react with the metals to form oxides. In this project, the specific route to oxide formation under consideration was room temperature reaction of low concentration oxygen in an argon atmosphere glove box with stored metal hydride samples. In order to compare the importance of this route to oxide formation of other possible routes, it is planned to analyze samples of cerium hydride exposed to the argon atmosphere of the glovebox for varying lengths of time using LECO oxygen analysis. This method involves mixing samples with carbon and measuring off-gas of CO and CO2 while heating the samples to high temperatures.

Determining the Effect of Oxygen Contamination in the Refinement of Actinide Metals Download Determining the Effect of Oxygen Contamination in the Refinement of Actinide Metals