Materials

Solution: To Clean Up the Environment

Battelle materials science research plays a critical part in technology to restore, protect, and sustain the environment.

Vitrification, a process that combines concentrated radioactive waste with glass-forming materials, has been used to clean up legacy waste from nuclear weapons production and military and industrial activities. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, working with scientists at the Savannah River Technology Center, developed “fast glass,” a more efficient formula for vitrifying radioactive waste at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site. This new formula, Frit 320, showed a melt rate 20 percent faster than the previous frit in smallscale melter tests. With more waste in each batch and faster production, this new glass formula significantly reduces the cost of vitrifying waste. One of Battelle’s first generation vitrification technologies was marketed as GeoSafe by the Japan Research Institute.

A new class of materials that can remove metals and radionuclides from aqueous and organic liquids and gaseous streams was also developed at Pacific Northwest. SAMMS (Self-Assembled Monolayers on Mesoporous Supports) technology integrates mesoporous ceramics technology first created by Mobil Oil Corporation with an innovative method for attaching “monolayers”—single layers of densely packed molecules—to the pore surfaces throughout the tiny grains of ceramic material. The molecules are custom designed to seek out mercury, lead, chromium and other metals and is available in powder form. SAMMS is being evaluated for cleanup activities at sites where mercury contamination is prevalent. In addition, SAMMS has potential applications in industry, particularly mining and metal finishing, where it could be used to clean processing water and retrieve valuable metals present in waste streams.