New material finds 'needle in a haystack,' shows promise for clean-up

More than 20 years after a nuclear reactor exploded in fire and spewed radioactive dust into the atmosphere above Chernobyl in the Ukraine, much of the land surrounding the power plant remains uninhabitable.

One of the radioactive isotopes that's causing the trouble is known as caesium-137. It's highly toxic, lasts for years and can cause cancer in people up to 30 years after the time it enters the body. And it's difficult to clean-up.

But Northwestern Chemistry researchers Mercouri Kanatzidis and Nan Ding have developed a new material to selectively soak up the caesium. The synthetic material, made from layers of a gallium, sulfur and antimony compound, is very selective and extremely successful in removing cesium from a sodium-heavy solution. (The solution had concentrations similar to those in real liquid nuclear waste.)

It is, in fact, cesium itself that triggers a structural change in the material, causing it to snap shut its pores, or windows, and trap the cesium ions within, just like a Venus Fly Trap. The material sequesters 100 percent of the cesium ions from the solution while at the same time ignoring all the sodium ions. This has incredible potential for the environment !

To read more about this exciting science read their results which are published online by the journal Nature Chemistry. http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/index.html