PNNL

Abstract

The predominant ionic chemistry and the similarity in ionic radius of actinides make it very difficult to structurally distinguish them in liquids. Here, while ab initio molecular dynamics shows that the f-states clearly affects the electronic properties, their impact on structural properties is not obvious. For the series of trivalent actinides U3+, Pu3+, Cm3+, Cf3+, Fm3+ in molten NaCl and FLiBe, actinide ligand bonds have a higher degree of covalency in NaCl (than in FLiBe), and a higher degree of ionicity in FLiBe. Furthermore, a machine learned classification model can distinguish atomic environments of chemically similar actinides, as long as atoms beyond the first solvation shells are considered. Our work shows that only two types of descriptors are necessary to account for all the fluctuations in heavy metal/molten salt mixtures: The first descriptor represents the electronic state of the heavy metal, while the second encompasses the local coordination environment.