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Quantitative understanding of uranium transport by high temperature fluids is crucial for confident assessment of its migration in a number of natural and artificially induced contexts, such as hydrothermal uranium ore deposits and nuclear waste stored in geological repositories. An additional recent and atypical context would be the seawater inundated fuel of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Given its wide applicability, understanding uranium transport will be useful regardless of whether nuclear power finds increased or decreased adoption in the future. The amount of uranium that can be carried by geofluids is enhanced by the formation of complexes with inorganic ligands. Carbonate has long been touted as a critical transporting ligand for uranium in both ore deposit and waste repository contexts. However, this paradigm has only been supported by experiments conducted at ambient conditions. We have experimentally evaluated the ability of carbonate-bearing fluids to dissolve (and therefore transport) uranium at high temperature, and discovered that in fact, at temperatures above 100 °C, carbonate becomes almost completely irrelevant as a transporting ligand. This demands a re-evaluation of a number of hydrothermal uranium transport models, as carbonate can no longer be considered key to the formation of uranium ore deposits or as an enabler of uranium transport from nuclear waste repositories at elevated temperatures. Carbonate species may play a role in uranium transport in natural systems and nuclear waste repositories at high temperatures. Here uranyl carbonate species are shown to decrease in stability under hydrothermal conditions, suggesting that these species may not mediate transport after all.

The transport and deposition of uranium under hydrothermal conditions in the Earth’s crust has been a subject of ongoing study but is yet to be completely understood. In addition, there is little known about the fate of nuclear waste, consisting of uranium from spent fuel and other radioactive materials, upon storage in repositories or in nuclear reactor facilities. Because the nuclear waste often comes in contact with aqueous fluids in storage environments, studies of uranyl complexation with chloride and other ligands in aqueous media, to high temperature and pressure conditions, are needed. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the speciation of aqueous uranyl (VI) chloride complexes, in solutions having a 0.05 M uranyl concentration and [Cl] concentrations ranging from 0.2 M to 6 M, under hydrothermal conditions. The aqueous uranyl chloride complexes in the samples were studied using Raman spectroscopy and the hydrothermal diamond anvil cell (HDAC), at temperatures up to 500 °C and pressures up to ~ 0.5 GPa. The uranyl bond stretching band feature occurring in the ~810 to 870 cm-1 region was fitted using the Voigt peak shape to determine the speciation of the equilibrium uranyl chloride complexes present in the samples. As expected, the n integer value of the UO2Cln+2-n complex species increases with the increase in temperature and chloride concentration, generally trending toward charge neutrality at high temperatures.