A chemical element called californium can help scientists not only store radioactive waste but also recycle it, a team of chemists found.
Dubbed the "wicked stuff," Florida State University professors found that californium has unique abilities to bond and separate other materials along with being extremely resistant to radiation damage.
"It's almost like snake oil," Florida State Professor Thomas Albrecht-Schmitt said in a press statement. "It sounds almost too good to be true."
Collecting data for the study and conducting experiments was not an easy task. Albrecht-Schmitt paid $1.4 million for 5 milligrams of californium. The purchase was funded by an endowment to the university in honor of retired professor Gregory Choppin. Albrecht-Schmitt revealed that his years of working with the U.S. Department of Energy contributed largely to making it possible for him to attain the element.
All of the experiments were conducted at Florida State, but Albrecht-Schmitt also worked with theorists and scientists from nine universities and institutes, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which supplied the californium.
The discovery can not only help researchers build new storage containers for radioactive wastes but also help separate radioactive fuel, which means the fuel could be recycled.
"This has real world application," he said, according to a TIME report. "It's not purely an academic practice. We're changing how people look at californium and how it can be used."
While the discovery is amazing, the extremely expensive price tag of the element can cause a major hindrance in it being used extensively.
Californium has the atomic number 98 and is a radioactive element, which was first produced at the University of California, Berkeley in 1950. Named after California and the University of California, it has the second-highest atomic mass of all elements that have been made in large enough amounts to be able to be seen with the human eye. Californium is, however, the heaviest natural element on Earth to be found in workable amounts. Heavier elements can only be obtained through synthesis, but any use of californium must be undertaken with full knowledge of its radioactivity.
The element is also made in Russia at the Research Institute of Atomic Reactors. Naturally-occurring californium is found on Earth in very concentrated uranium deposits, and only in very small quantities. Traces have also been discovered near places where californium is used to prospect for minerals and for medicinal use. It bonds very well to soil and can be found 500 times more concentrated in the soil than in the water surrounding it.
The element has the ability to accumulate in skeletal tissue and disrupt the formation of red blood cells. Californium can enter the body from consuming contaminated food or drinks or by breathing air with suspended particles of the element. Once in the body, only 0.05 percent of the element reaches the bloodstream. About 65 percent of that californium gets deposited in the skeleton, 25 percent in the liver and the rest in other organs, or excreted, mainly in the urine. Health issues caused by this element include cancers, immune system damage, leukemia, miscarriages, stillbirths, deformities and fertility problems.
The new study was published in the online journal Nature Chemistry.
