Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation

Transformative discovery in science is driven by innovation in technology. Our boldest undertakings in particle physics have at their foundation precision instrumentation. To reveal the profound connections underlying everything we see from the smallest scales to the largest distances in the Universe, to understand its fundamental constituents, and to reveal what is still unknown, we must invent, develop, and deploy advanced instrumentation. Investments in High Energy Physics (HEP) enabled by instrumentation have been richly rewarded with discoveries of the tiny masses of the neutrinos, the origin of mass itself: the enigmatic Higgs boson, and the surprising accelerating expansion of the Universe. What we have learned is remarkable, unexpected, exciting and mysterious; raising many new questions waiting to be answered. The quest to answer them drives innovation that improves the nation's health, wealth, and security, inspiring the public and drawing young people to science. Excellence and innovation come most effectively from diverse teams of people. Success, therefore, depends critically on attracting, engaging, and supporting a diverse cadre of young people to the field, and ensuring an inclusive environment at all levels. The program laid out in the 2014 Particle Physics Projects Prioritization Panel (P5) report "Building for Discovery - A Strategic Plan for U.S. Particle Physics in a Global Context" guides current and near future experiments to exploit these and other discoveries, and the instrumentation innovation they require, to push the frontiers of science into new territory. To explore this territory HEP will soon embark on planning the next generation of experiments. Realizing these experiments will require giant leaps in capabilities beyond the instrumentation of today. Accordingly, now is a pivotal moment to invest in the accelerated development of cost-effective instrumentation with greatly improved sensitivity and performance that will make measurable the unmeasurable, enabling a tool-driven revolution to open the door to future discoveries. Historic scientific opportunities await us, enabled by executing the instrumentation research plan outlined here.

Argonne National Laboratory is developing an alternative method for digesting irradiated low enriched uranium foil targets to produce ⁹⁹Mo in neutral/alkaline media. This method involves the electrolytic dissolution of irradiated uranium foil in sodium bicarbonate solution, followed by the precipitation of carbonate, base-insoluble fission and activation products, and uranyl species with CaO. The addition of CaO is vital for the effective anion exchange separation of ⁹⁹MoO₄^2- from the fission products, since most of the interfering anions (e.g., CO₃^2-) are removed from the solution while the molybdate remains in it. An anion exchange is used to retain and purify the ⁹⁹Mo from the filtrate. The electrochemical dissolver has been designed and will be tested with low-burnup depleted uranium foil at Argonne and later with high-burnup targets at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.