National Nuclear User Facility at the Centre for Radiochemistry Research (CRR)

The Centre for Radiochemistry Research (CRR) at The University of Manchester (UoM) was established in 1999. It is a key part of UoM's nuclear facilities and capability portfolio and provided a pioneering link between academia and the nuclear sector, offering a unique and vital facility in the UK to conduct innovative, high-impact radiochemistry from blue-skies research to industry-ready development work. Given the harsh wear of radiochemical and nuclear research, after 20 years of service the original labs are being decommissioned and the UoM is building a new and expanded CRR which will enable us to work with higher levels of radioactive compounds, in-line with our institutions drive to work with 'real world' levels of active materials, and specifically to host this NNUF application.

There is a substantial portfolio of equipment that can be added to the new CRR from the old incarnation, but some items of equipment date back to 1990, which is far past reasonable operational lifetimes and they are now exceedingly unreliable and could become permanently inoperable at any moment. There is therefore a need to renew some of these items and also to add new capability to give added-value so that we may make a decisive step-change in capability in order to meet Government (BEIS), NIRAB, NNUF, and EPSRC national strategic goals. Therefore, we request an equipment bundle to forge a unique international capability that will include: (i) new dual-source single crystal X-ray diffractometer; (ii) replacement 400 MHz NMR spectrometer; (iii) new SQUID magnetometer; (iv) more sensitive and high-throughput alpha-, beta-, and gamma-radiometric counters; (v) glove boxes for transuranics including ATR-IR, balance, ball mill, centrifuge, and HF sonic welding for bagging-in/-out; (vi) spectroscopic suite of 2-photon, fluorescence, and LIBS spectometers; (vii) a national, managed stock of 237Np and 242Pu.

The requested equipment will integrate with existing kit in the new CRR to deliver a unique, comprehensive combination of state-of-the-art analytical, handling, and recycling techniques across solid and solution phases, in model and real conditions, enabling exciting, ground-breaking technical and scientific advances for the academic and industrial communities that will be internationally unrivalled. An indicative list of research areas that the NNUF@ CRR will be able to support includes: (i) speciation of coordination and organometallic complexes; (ii) spectroscopy; (iii) magnetism; (iv) environmental radiochemistry, geochemistry, mobility, and reprocessing; (v) analytical separations and low-level analyses; (vi) nuclear forensics; (vii) nuclear decommissioning of steels and concretes; (viii) colloids; (ix) computational modelling; (x) precursors to materials, fuels, and molten salts. The requested equipment will either directly contribute to the study of (i)-(x) or will peripherally support them. This facility will greatly reduce the enduring barriers to working with active samples, expanding the area and generating cohorts of early career researchers trained in radiochemistry and nuclear disciplines.

The CRR is run by a team composed of two Professorial co-directors, two Senior Experimental Officers, an administrator, and a technician in addition to two Readers who are co-investigators, and this team will constitue the management group of this NNUF that will also establish a diverse external advisory board.

Reflecting the importance of this capability to the priorities of the UoM, the CRR and this NNUF application enjoy strong institutional support by way of refurbishment, people, existing equipment, and 20% fEC contributions that gives a total of £10M matching funds. The new NNUF@CRR will be a strategic asset to the UK and play a vital and unique role in the UK and international nuclear landscape, and the demand for such a capability is evidenced by a strong portfolio of academic, national lab, and industrial Letters of Support.

Economic Impact
The UK economy will benefit from employment of newly trained early-career scientists, and through development of new technologies and processes based upon new research discoveries. In due course, new spin-out companies of direct economic benefit to society could be launched from the scientific advances developed within this facility. Outputs of high quality research, underpinned by the proposed instrumentation, will drive progress and guide the development of new scientific approaches, technologies and products. The science that this capability will enable directly addresses recommendations of NIRAB and programs of research of large industrial companies, and so will improve and enhance the quality of life in the UK and world populations though the positive impacts of this research on energy, sustainability, and the nuclear industry.

Societal Impact
The new facility will underpin stalls used in school visits and science fairs to present the positive achievements of radiochemistry and nuclear research. We will maximise opportunities for this type of engagement with the public, policy makers and leaders of industry and commerce, for example at high profile events such as the Manchester Science Festival. We will seek to contribute to CINCH to broaden our impact (https://www.cinch-project.eu/). We will thus be strong advocates for science and engineering, RCUK and EPSRC. External users will of course be from institutions with their own outreach programmes and we would expect the NNUF@CRR facility to be prominently highlighted in their own activities when based on research conducted within the facility.

People
Incoming early-career scientists will gain key high-level skills and training, which will be vital for their research and will augment their employability within and across the UK economy. These researchers will gain a major career advantage as they will have been trained to use world-leading instrumentation applicable to a range of research areas and disciplines. Thus, the project will train scientists to enhance the necessary skills-base of the UK in important and timely scientific areas. More generally, the data collected will contribute to many PhD theses, and hence will benefit a broader group of PhD students. Some data will be collected for final year undergraduate students, thus the equipment will contribute to their careers by giving them better final year project experiences and hence better degrees and better job prospects. As our training programmes develop we will seek accreditation, so that they become sector-recognised training courses adding to the CPD and formal qualifications of researchers.

Knowledge
This new capability will contribute directly to major scientific advances in the research areas and themes described in the proposal. This will provide a strong driver for their development, implementation and exploitation by industry (see Economic Impact above). The research will inform stakeholders, funding agencies and policy makers across the physical sciences, radio-chemistry, and nuclear sectors specifically. The research supported by the new facility includes much that is world-leading and truly international in its outlook and where the UK has a major reputation. We will continue to work on increasing the academic impact of the CRR, and we will train and mentor ECRs in writing manuscripts and will do so for co-author external users, aiming to publish as many papers as possible in gold-standard journals.