INE Laboratories
KIT-INE, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology - Institute for Nuclear Waste Disposal, Karlsruhe, Germany
The Institute for Nuclear Waste Disposal (Institut fuer Nukleare Entsorgung, INE) belongs to the newly founded Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), a fusion between the Karlsruhe Research Center of the German Helmholtz Association and the University of Karlsruhe. INE research activities focus on the geochemical aspects of the long-term safety of nuclear waste disposal. Sound expertise and state-of-the-art, advanced analytical techniques are available for actinide speciation and geochemistry, investigation of actinide migration, as well as research into partitioning and the vitrification of high level liquid waste.
KIT-INE has a number of facilities available as pooled facility within the scope of the ACTINET-I3 Project. The active laboratories at KIT-INE are licensed and equipped for working with radionuclides of all types including reactor fuels and alpha emitters. The INE-laboratories with their state-of-the-art equipment and instrumentation are located in one building complex. The INE-Beamline for actinide research is also available as a ACTINET-I3 pooled facility for X-ray spectroscopy investigations and is located on the same KIT site, not far from the INE laboratories.
The following facilities and techniques are offered:
Actinide laboratories
- Hot cells (Spent fuel experiments)
- Glove boxes, partly with inert gas atmosphere (e.g., dedicated to migration experiments, speciation)
- Classical radioanalytical methods (a, ß, γ-spectroscopy, autoradiography)
- ICP-OES, ICP-MS, high resolution ICP-MS coupled to glove box, Laser-ablation, Ion chromatography, X-ray fluorescence, X-ray diffractometry
- Scanning electron microscopy, SEM
- NMR spectroscopy of actinide containing solutions, 400 MHz, variable temperature, 2-channel setup for multinuclear experiments
- 400 MHz NMR spectroscopy of liquid samples
Actinide speciation techniques
- Chemical speciation (e.g., Capillary electrophoresis-ICP-MS; Field flow fractionation-ICP-MS)
- Photoelectron spectroscopy, XPS, atomic force microscopy, AFM
- Laser spectroscopy
- Time resolved laser fluorescence spectroscopy - TRLFS,
- Laser induced breakdown detection - LIBD
partly combined with inert gas glove boxes - Multifunctional X-ray spectroscopy (XAFS) beam-line for actinides (more...)
- Experiments with activities up to 106 times the limit of exemption
- Various detection schemes and sample environments
- XAFS, GI-XAFS, PFY-XAFS, RIXS, micro(µ)-focused studies possible
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More information
Contact person
Thorsten SCHÄFER