When chemical intuition fails: The importance of hierarchical chemical environments when studying environmental problems
Aurora E. Clark
Washington State University, Department of Chemistry, Pullman, WA 99163
Coupled interactions that incorporate both local and long-range electronic structure can lead to unexpected physicochemical properties and reactivity. Invariably, as the chemical complexity of the surrounding environment increases, such interactions emerge. Not only does this lead to instances where our chemical intuition fails, but also to the development of new methods that can reveal coupled and correlated behavior across length and timescale. This work will discuss examples that derive from multi-component and chemically extreme condensed phase systems that include solutions relevant to the treatment of spent nuclear fuel and separations science.