December 18, 2013
American Chemical Society Podcast: Detecting Radioactive Material In Nuclear Waste Water
The latest episode in the American Chemical Society's (ACS') award-winning Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions podcast series features a new design for a highly sensitive device that can detect the radioactive materials uranium and plutonium in waste water.
Based on a report by Jorge M. Seminario, Ph.D., and Narendra Kumar, Ph.D., in ACS' The Journal of Physical Chemistry C, the new podcast is available without charge at iTunes and from http://www.acs.org/globalchallenges.
But recently, scientists have discovered that radioactive materials in water can clump onto flakes of graphene oxide (GO). Based on theoretical models and calculations, researchers predicted that GO could sense and identify extremely low levels — single molecules — of various substances. Seminario's team set out to see how best to adapt this for uranium and plutonium sensing.
Using the latest advances in supercomputing, they modeled several different variations of GO to figure out which one would be the most sensitive and selective in detecting uranium and plutonium in nuclear waste water. They concluded that attaching something called a carbonyl functional group to GO would serve as an effective nanosensor for these radioactive materials.
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