Mittwoch, 25. Mai 2022, 17:00 - 18:30 iCal

ERN-Environmental Engagements: talks

Karin Hain "What can we learn from radionuclide signatures about their emission sources and environmental transport"


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Vortrag


About the talk:

Since the beginnings of the „nuclear age“, man-made radionuclides have been released into the environment either by atmospheric nuclear weapons tests, nuclear accidents or from the nuclear fuel cycle. Long-lived radionuclides like uranium, plutonium or technetium, are mostly not an immediate hazard due to their low specific activity, but they will be part of our environment over thousands of years and require long-term monitoring. A comprehensive understanding of their environmental migration behaviour is essential to protect the population from future exposure and also for the application of these radionuclides as tracers to study environmental transport processes, e.g. ocean currents. The environmental concentrations of such radionuclides are still extremely low so that their analysis requires an ultra-sensitive method like Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS). The source terms for radionuclides in the environment and our present understanding of their migration behaviour will be introduced in the talk. The second part will be dedicated to present developments at the AMS facility VERA with particular focus on the new isotope signature 233U/236U which allows the identification of emission sources for anthropogenic uranium.

About the speaker:

Karin Hain is a senior scientist in the Isotope Physics group of the Faculty of Physics at the University of Vienna. She joined the group as post-doc in 2016 after having received her PhD from the Technical University of Munich. During her PhD work she had studied potential plutonium releases into the Pacific Ocean from the Fukushima accident. For her work on the uranium ratio 233U/236U as a new fingerprint of uranium releases into the environment, she received the Fritz-Kohlrausch-Award 2020 from the Austrian Physical Society. Hain is presently leading two FWF funded projects to develop new ultra-sensitive detection methods to analyse long-lived radionuclide tracers to study ocean currents.

Language: English

When: 25.05.2022, 17:00-18:30 (45 min Talk, 45 min Q&A)

Where: Zoom [https://univienna.zoom.us/j/69793010787?pwd=c0NTZmVEM2RmV29LSm8xaTJUQWM3dz09]

Meeting-ID: 697 9301 0787

Kenncode: 427213

no registration required

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Veranstalter

Environmental Research Network


Kontakt

Johannes Ehrendorfer
Environmental Research Network
+436507771296
johannes.ehrendorfer@univie.ac.at