With funding from this grant, the radiochemical facility at Wayne State University will purchase additional alpha spectrometry laboratory instrumentation to augment existing capability in environmental research. The facility has been operating at full capacity over the past two years, training students in frontier research and supporting researchers inside and outside of the University. Due to an increase in the number of research projects and increased demand for additional radioanalytical work by researchers within and outside the University, the need for this additional modern equipment has become apparent. In the near term, the new alpha spectrometer will be of immediate use to the principal investigator during his participation in the U.S.GEOTRACES North Atlantic campaign in late CY 2010. More generally, the acquisition of the additional 8-input alpha spectrometer will double the facility's counting capability to support teaching, training and service to students, postdoctoral associates and research collaborators.
Broader Impact: Acquisition of the additional alpha spectrometer is expected to result in additional and improved training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in the geosciences, many of whom come from under-represented minority groups. The instruments will be used to train new a generation of radiochemists at a time when there is a national shortage of well-trained radiochemists.
The primary goal of the project is to enhance the counting capability of our Low Level Short-lived Radionuclide Counting Laboratory at Wayne State University, by purchasing and installing an additional 8-input alpha spectrometer to support our teaching, training and service missions to our students, postdocs and collaborators. This acquisition of the instrument has resulted in additional training of our undergraduate and graduate students. Some of the students are going to graduate school with their research experience in our radiochemical laboratory. Addition of this instrument has increased our research productivity and is helping our collaborators at several educational institutions across the State of Michigan and our nation at large. The purchase of this instrument allowed us to analyze a large number of particulate samples in time for the concentrations of in-situ polonium (210Po) collected from the Atlantic Ocean – GEOTRACES cruise, which was funded by the National Science Foundation. This measurement will aid in understanding the cycling of polonium and lead and their scavenging behavior under different conditions (oxygen minimum zones, near hydrothermal vents, bottom nepheloid layers, boundary scavenging). The measurements of these nuclides are useful to investigate the environmental changes that are taking place in marine system. Precise and accurate measurements of these two nuclides require that they are analyzed in time, due to the relatively short half-life of 210Po (138.4 days). Augmenting the existing counting capability with this NSF-Instrument grant helped us to accomplish the goal. In addition to the ongoing two NSF-funded GEOTRACES projects, the instrument is also used for another federally-funded project (US Army Corps) to investigate the sediment dynamics in the impoundments in the mid-western United States. Most of the impoundments/dams in United States were built last century (between 1920s and 1960s) and they all have reached near storage capacity of sediments. Dredging of all of those impoundments/dams would be quite expensive and hence a systematic study on the sediment accumulation and post-depositional movements in impoundments/dams are required. Such a study can serve as a model for many other impoundments in the nation.
