New methods to minimize the impact of Nuclear Waste

[Zor]

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Researchers develop filter for nuclear waste

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September 19, 2008

AUSTRALIAN researchers say they have created a low-cost material to filter and safely store nuclear waste.
The potential breakthrough for the environment was made by a team of scientists from Queensland University of Technology, led by Associate Professor Zhu Huai Yong from the School of Physical and Chemical Sciences.

Prof Zhu said the discovery was particularly important as the world increased its reliance on nuclear energy.

"You have to keep nuclear waste somewhere for hundreds of years," Dr Zhu said.

"Water is used to cool nuclear reactors and during the mining and purification of nuclear material, so waste water is a big problem.

"For example, there is a lake in the United States filled with millions of gallons of nuclear waste water."

But if the waste was stored conventionally in lakes or steel containers, there was a danger it could leak and pollute the land around it.

Professor Zhu said the QUT team had discovered how to create nanofibres, which are millionths of a millimetre in size and can permanently lock away radioactive ions by displacing the existing sodium ions in the fibre.

"We have created ceramic nanofibres which attract and trap radioactive cations (positively charged ions), possibly forever," he said.

"The ceramic material can last a very long time, much longer than the radioactivity of a radioactive ion."

Ceramic was also more chemically stable than metal, could last much longer and was much cheaper to make than steel.

The ceramic nanofibres were made from titanium dioxide, a mineral found abundantly in Australia and used to colour white paint.

The fibres were mixed with caustic soda and heated in a laboratory oven to make the ceramic material.

The nanofibres, which are up to 40 micrometres in length, look like white powder to the human eye, Prof Zhu said.

"The fibres are in very thin layers, less than one nanometre in width, and the radioactive ions are attracted into the space between the layers," he said.

"Once the ceramic material absorbs a certain amount, the layers collapse to lock the radioactive ions inside."

I salute you, Australian Engineers and Scientists!

Zor

[Sea Skimmer]

That will be pretty amazing if this becomes a practical way to dispose of low and mid level liquid nuclear waste. In all reality that kind of waste is a bigger problem then say high level spent fuel waste. The high level stuff gets all the publicity when people want to d something as awful as bury it inside a mountain that overlooks a nuclear rocket engine test base, but the low level stuff is ten thousand times more common.

[fnord]

Yeah, just is a bummer that there isn't an Australian nuclear power and fuel cycle industry to trial this on.

Since it seems that, from a cursory study, that regulatory definitions of LLW generally centre on specific activity (such as Ci/m^3), this process may actually be, by filtering the active isotopes out of the LLW, creating higher level waste - which is still good, as the volume of waste is reduced dramatically and the activity does appear to be drastically demobilised in-situ. Freeing up the rest of the formerly-contaminated LLW is also a good thing, either for (now much simpler) disposal or reuse.

[JointStrikeFighter]

WOO MY UNI!

That aside, seriously cool research.

[mr friendly guy]

I wonder if this will make the "nuclear is bad, mmkay" crowd at home shut up? I doubt it.

But good news all the same. We might not be getting nuclear in the near future, but other countries are planning to increase the amount of energy they get from nuclear. We might have a new export market.