Four research facilities will join the nation's stable of 32 Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) with a collective $40 million in grants from the Department of Energy with the aim of understanding the chemistry of radioactive substances in order to advance strategies for nuclear waste clean up efforts.
Joining the 32 established EFRC laboratories will be teams from Florida State University, Ohio State University, the University of South Carolina and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), which will work with researchers at Washington State University.
The research is expected to impact cleanup and decommissioning efforts at sites like the Hanford Site in south-central Washington, which included, at one point, nine nuclear reactors and five plutonium processing facilities used in weapons-grade plutonium production.
PNNL fellow and Washington State University regents professor of chemistry Sue Clark, who will serve as the director of Interfacial Dynamics in Radioactive Environments and Materials (IDREAM), said the university and PNNL would coordinate through “joint faculty appointments, postdoctoral associate mentoring and graduate education in a project in which science focused on a problem “of societal importance.”
Studies will also focus on material degradation associated with radioactive environments. The point is to develop new strategies for transporting, collecting, storing and processing radioactive waste.
“Because the waste is highly radioactive, it will evolve over time and we must predict these (chemical) changes in advance to design effective methods for remediation and safe disposal,” NBC quoted WSU associate professor of chemistry Aurora Clark as saying.
It is hoped that establishing a center will help attract a new generation of scientists to critical research areas of radiochemistry, Clark said.