We congratulate the deputy director of the “IGNS National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine”, candidate of geological sciences, senior researcher Sevruk Iryna Mykhailivna on the awarding of the Prize of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to young scientists for the work “Development of cost-effective methods of cleaning liquid radioactive waste from tritium”.
The work contributed to the solution of a number of urgent problems: the development of simple, affordable methods of tritium immobilization, in accordance with the existing problem of tritium migration in the environment; creation of cost-effective ways of cleaning the moderator of heavy water reactors – deuterium water – from tritium.
The problem dealt with by Sevruk I.M. is extremely important and concerns the prospects for the development of nuclear energy in Ukraine, in particular, the environmental aspects of the operation of nuclear reactors. As the natural resources of liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons are exhausted, humanity is getting closer to the discovery and introduction of new types of energy, among which the use of tritium in thermonuclear energy may prove to be one of the cheapest and most effective. However, the criteria and means of tritium safety have not yet been worked out. Determination of geochemical parameters of isotopic fractionation of hydrogen during the interaction of aqueous solutions with clay minerals becomes highly relevant in the sense of evaluating the buffer (protective) properties of the geological environment under conditions of increasing man-made load.
To solve these problems, Sevruk I.M. a number of long-term experiments on the fractionation of protium, deuterium and tritium from aqueous solutions on clay minerals and their composite mixtures were carried out.
We wish you further success in science!