The mineral zircon suffers more structural damage from the α-decay of plutonium present in its crystal than was thought. That could have a knock-on effect on strategies for managing nuclear waste. On page 190 of this issue, Farnan, Cho and Weber describe how nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy can be used to assess the damage caused to a solid's structure by α-decays of an emitter incorporated into its crystal. The authors test their technique on the mineral zircon (ZrSiO_4), and find that each α-decay event displaces significantly more atoms than simulations had predicted.
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