A comprehensive understanding of actinide coordination chemistry and its structure is essential in many aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle, such as fuel reprocessing, waste management, reactor safety, and non-proliferation efforts. Managing radioactive waste generated during the nuclear fuel cycle has recently become more important, accordingly increasing the importance of designing appropriate waste forms and storage solutions for long-term waste disposal. Compared to the increase in the need for understanding the chemistry of major radioactive elements, the information on the local structure of the radioactive elements, especially actinides, remains unknown. To probe this issue, X-ray absorption fine structure (XAFS) can be applied. By analyzing the EXAFS (extended X-ray absorption fine structure) and XANES (X-ray absorption near edge structure), the local structure around atoms can be determined. However, the radioactive properties of the nuclides hindered the measurement of EXAFS and XANES, due to the difficulties of preparation, containment, and transfer of the sample. To measure the EXAFS of various compounds regarding the back-end nuclear fuel cycle, laboratory-based EXAFS (hiXAS, HP spectroscopy) has been introduced which can measure the EXAFS and XANES at the energy range of 5-18 keV. Compounds of Copper (Cu foil, CuO samples), Zirconium (Zr foil), and Europium (Eu2O3) were used for the verification of the laboratory -based EXAFS at a given energy range. The measured EXAFS spectrum of various compounds exhibit good agreement with the theoretical data, showing an R-factor of less than 0.02. It was found that each graph has a first peak corresponding to 2.55Å for Cu foil (Cu-Cu), 1.93Å for CuO samples (Cu-O), 3.23Å for Zr foil (Zr-Zr), and from 2.32Å to 2.34Å for Eu2O3 (Eu-O), which agree well with other values from the literature. From the result, it can be implied that this equipment can be used especially in the back-end nuclear fuel cycle field to enhance the understanding of local structure in radiochemistry.
Laboratory equipment will continue to be developed and created as long as experiments continue. Up until now, the designs have been focused on the functional role; successfully process the study purpose. However, nowadays, the requirements of providing emotional satisfaction of the design, has increased. Even so, the users are normally limited by specific groups and investments on these designs have been neglected due to small annual production by the small market. Through this study, we have conducted an emotional evaluation on Temperature and Humidity Chamber's (TH Chamber) exterior shape. First of all, we extracted emotional words and placed them in categories that represent these emotions and conducted an emotional evaluation on four typical TH chamber models. They were selected based on its door lock type and control box type. The result showed that the 'fixed type' of control box and the 'handle type' of door lock were most favorable by the users, satisfying the five representative emotions; 'Attractiveness', 'Classiness', 'Comfortableness', 'Pleasant' and 'Satisfaction in Usability'. Particularly, all 4 emotional words in the 'Satisfaction in Usability' category recorded over 3.65. This indicates that Satisfaction in Usability is relatively an important category when expressing laboratory equipment. The result of this research is expected to be used as a basic data to find a way of right approach in laboratory equipment design.