Hi all! This week I’ve made the trip up to Glasgow for the 42nd Iupac congress (Iupac is the International union of pure and applied chemistry, but you all knew that already, I’m sure). It’s being held in the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre, affectionally known as the Armadillo for reasons that become immediately evident when you see the Clyde theatre.

Sir Harry Kroto kicked off proceedings today with the first plenary lecture. He gave us a whirlwind ride through the discovery of buckminsterfullerene (C₆₀) and how that led to a revival of carbon chemistry research to give us all kinds of fullerene cages and nanotube structures, along with their myriad applications. The second part of Sir Harry’s lecture concentrated much more on outreach activities - the notion that common sense has been replaced with common nonsense - i.e. that many people do not look at the world in a sufficiently scientific way to be able to judge whether they are being presented with evidence-based reasoning or being led up the garden path. He added that we need to harness the power of the internet to disseminate some ‘uncommon sense’, i.e. science, and described some of his work with the vega science trust and a website called geoset, where students record video slide presentations describing various topics in all branches of science and the arts.

Highlights from the morning’s academic session included Trevor Griffiths’s talk about a technique for processing spent nuclear fuel. Called CEMSO (Catalyst enhanced molten salt oxidation), it involves heating up the spent fuel that contains uranium dioxide (UO₂) in a bath of molten sodium carbonate at 600 centigrade with alkali nitrate (the catalyst) and bubbling oxygen through the whole lot. The superoxide formed penetrates the insoluble uranium dioxide converting it to insoluble potassium or sodium diuranate (M₂U₂O₇) and other fission products such as lanthanides, caesium and strontium can be removed as tractable phosphate salts, allowing the molten salt bath to be recycled.

The programme for the week is packed full of chemistry goodies, so watch this space for more updates!

Phillip Broadwith