In molten salt electrodeposition, a clear understanding of the initial nucleation and growth of nuclei formed on a substrate/electrode is critical to determining the morphology and structure of deposits in order to produce devices and products in various scientific fields. However, it is a challenge to obtain and characterize micro- or nano-sized nuclei, especially for very active elements due to their high sensitivity to water and oxygen. This problem is made even worse when the nuclei are accompanied by a larger amount of solid salts. In this work, we have designed a detachable disk electrode (DDE) which can prevent inessential salts from adhering to the disk substrate, greatly reducing the operational complexity, and ultimately enhancing the effectiveness and ease of visualizing initial nucleation. Uranium, a typical radioactive element with high metallic activity in the nuclear fuel cycle, was chosen as an example to test the sampling performance of the DDE. High-quality visualization of the initial nucleation and growth morphology of uranium on different substrates is presented here for the first time. The DDE provides a universal and simple scheme with wide applicability to the study of initial nucleation in high temperature molten salts, in fields such as electrodeposition, electrosynthesis, electroplating, etc.

在熔融盐电沉积中，对在基材/电极上形成的核的初始成核和生长的清楚了解对于确定沉积物的形态和结构以生产各种科学领域的设备和产品至关重要。然而，由于其对水和氧的高度敏感性，获得和表征微米级或纳米级的核是一个挑战，特别是对于非常活跃的元素而言。当原子核伴随着大量的固体盐时，这个问题变得更加严重。在这项工作中，我们设计了一种可拆卸的盘状电极（DDE），该电极可防止非必需盐粘附到盘状基板上，从而大大降低了操作复杂性，并最终提高了有效性和使初始成核的可视化变得容易。铀，以核燃料循环中具有高金属活度的典型放射性元素为例来测试DDE的采样性能。首次在这里展示了铀在不同基质上的初始成核和生长形态的高质量可视化。DDE提供了一种通用且简单的方案，具有广泛的适用性，可用于研究电沉积，电合成，电镀等领域的高温熔融盐中的初始成核。