EP13B-0953
Theoretical investigations of uranium isotope fractionation caused by nuclear volume effects

Monday, 14 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Sha Yang, CAS Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijng, China
Abstract:
Because the half-life times of uranium isotopes are all very long, e.g., 4.5Ga for 238U and 0.7Ga for 235U, people actually treat uranium isotope system as a stable one in many young geologic systems (e.g., Bopp et al., 2010; Basu et al., 2014). There is an increasing trend of using U isotope method to study surface geochemistry problems. For example, people start to use U isotopes as a new tracer to determine the change of redox conditions (Holmden et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2015). However, there are only a few equilibrium U isotope fractionation factors available right now. The new enterprise of U isotope method requires a much expanded data-base of equilibrium U isotope fractionation factor.

Many evidences showed that heavy isotope systems could be significantly fractionated as the consequence of the nuclear volume effect (NVE) or so-called nuclear field shift effect,which is a driving force of mass-independent fractionation induced by differences in nuclear size and nuclear shape of isotopes. Here we theoretically estimate the magnitude of equilibrium isotope fractionation factors of U-bearing gaseous and solid compounds caused by NVE via density functional theory (DFT) quantum chemistry methods with careful evaluation on quantum relativistic effects. Our calculation results show the NVE drives 238U/235U fractionations can be up to -4.43‰ between U(VI) and U(IV) species, or can be up to -1.68‰ between U(IV) and U(III) species, at room temperature. The U4+-bearing species or phases tend to enrich heavier isotopes (i.e., 238U) relative to the oxidized phases (U6+-bearing), and enrich lighter isotopes (i.e., 235U) relative to the reduced U(III) phases (U3+-bearing), which generally agree with the recent experimental results (Wang et al., 2015). Our results provide a base for broad applications of equilibrium U isotope fractionation in surface environments.