Determination of radiation stability of crown ethers

As with all production operations, plutonium production created large quantities of (mixed) radioactive waste. Plutonium production continued after the war until January 1987 when the last production reactor ceased operation at the Hanford site. Reprocessing fuel from nine production reactors created a large quantity of radioactive mixed wastes, much of which was and continues to be stored in underground storage tanks. Three major reprocessing flowsheets (e.g., processes), the large scale recovery of enriched uranium (U), radioactive cesium (Cs) and strontium (Sr) recovery, and a variety of other waste management operations led to a variety of major chemical processing facilities and thus waste types. Both inorganic- and organic-containing waste was produced and is being stored at Hanford. Crown ethers appear to be promising ligands for use in solvent extraction of radionuclides. Here, mass spectrometry has been used to determine the relative radiation stability of the pure stereoisomers, cis-syn-cis-DCH-6 and cis-anti-cis-DCH-6